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Time to get serious about online scams

It never fails to amaze me just how many people get ripped off by online scams.

Whether it's a fake rego renewal email that directs you to a site which harvests your details and credit card number or a "too good to be true" investment offer, far too many people seem to be losing their shirts because they simply are not aware of the problem.

This RNZ story is the perfect example of how modern scammers are harnessing technology to seperate naive dupes from their cash.

Whilst many victims blame their banks and demand compensation, the reality is that this is more often than not, simply ignorance and sometimes greed on the part of the victim.

Yes, in some cases the banks could have done more to flag transactions as suspicious but ultimately they are their to follow the instructions of customers, not to be their mothers.

When you look at the enormous scale of the losses it becomes obvious that this is not a small problem and that some action needs to be taken.

Ideally, that action would be in the form of education. We need to make people aware of the basic tenets of safe internet use. Make sure they're aware that there are no free lunches and that if something sounds too good to be true then it should be regarded with suspicion.

Just as importantly however, it's time that advertising platforms started behing held accountable for the advertisements they run, given that many of these scams are promoted via this mechanism.

I have completely lost track of the number of times I've reported scammy ads to YouTube/Google, only to see them still running weeks or even months later. The normal response from the automated system is "we'll look into it and if we find it to be fradulent then we'll take it down". This rarely actually happens.

As I've said so many times, I find it amazing that YouTube can detect a piece of copyrighted music from just a few notes in a video and then either block that video or divert the ad revenue to a claimant -- yet they can't spot these scam ads?

I spent the best part of four hours one day simply reporting scammy Elon Musk livestream videos that were being run by crypto-scammers that had hijacked other people's channels. None of those streams were taken down so goodness knows how much money was harvested by these scammers.

Part of the problem is that the big players (Google/YouTube and Facebook) are faceless corporations that don't have a phone number you can ring or even an email address with "real people" on the other end. All their systems are automated and if the AI algorithm says "not a problem" then scam reports simply get ignored.

Even the media and government watchdogs seem to be unable to raise a real human within these organisations when they need to do so making the removal of scams a very protracted or even impossible option.

It is for this reason that I would be all in favour of penalising advertising companies who do not act promptly to remove scam ads once they're reported. There should be a maximum response time and a human in the loop -- or significant penalties should be applied because a failure to act with alacrity means those companies are actually complicit in the scam and become accomplices. After all, it's not as if they couldn't afford to introduce such protections -- they make billions of dollars every year.

If we can't educate the great unwashed then the least we can do is hold the ad companies accountable for their indifference.

Carpe Diem folks!

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