Scammers love the internet but who should pay when unsuspecting consumers are conned?

Banks and tech companies are pointing the finger at each other as neither side wants to take responsibility — or pay the bill — when an individual is defrauded.

Fraud is the most common crime in the United Kingdom, and a staggering amount of it originates online. According to research by financial services industry body UK Finance, almost 80 percent of authorized push payment fraud — where victims make the payment themselves — stems from online sources. Criminals stole half a billion pounds through fraud last year.

The U.S. tech giant Meta is a particularly bad offender. 

Lloyds Banking Group has found that someone gets defrauded on a Meta-owned platform every seven minutes, and says that platforms like Facebook Marketplace and Instagram account for almost half of all purchase scams.

But it’s the banks which end up footing the bill for victim reimbursements. In 2022, banks which are signed up to a voluntary code returned almost £300 million to victims of authorised push payment fraud. Soon they’ll be on the hook for even more, as reimbursing scam victims is set to become mandatory across the U.K. from October — although that date has already been delayed six months.

Now the lenders are saying it’s time tech platforms should be on the hook financially for the scams that come from their sites.

“We want victims to be reimbursed, but we also think everybody whose systems have been exploited by the criminal should probably be a part of that,” said Ben Donaldson, managing director for economic crime at UK Finance, a financial services industry body. ...

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