THE BANK OF Ireland has today said that the Irish Government needs to legislate in order to introduce ‘SMS scam filters’, in order to take action against fraudulent spam messages.

These measures are already in place in other countries such as the US, Canada and the UK. 

Susan Russell, the CEO of Bank of Ireland’s Retail Ireland division, today urged policymakers and digital platforms to take “decisive action” to protect consumers from the “growing threat” of online scams. 

Speaking at a conference on fraud prevention at Trinity College Dublin, Russell said that there has “never” been so many ways for criminals to target their victims through scams. 

“Whether it is through a text message, a messaging app, by phone or through a fake social media advert fraud has become an omnipresent threat to consumers and our customers. Other sectors have a responsibility to take action to prevent their services and platforms being used by criminals,” she said. 

Russell called on the Irish Government to legislate “for full SMS scam filters, already deployed successfully in other jurisdictions”. 

She also urged for swift reform of the EU’s Digital Services Act. 

Russell described the act as a “good concept in theory, which doesn’t work in the real world”. 

The act relies on “trusted flagger” to report fraudulent ads, but Russell said that many of these scam ads “vanish quickly” before consumers even realise that they have been scammed. 

Russell said that digital platforms should be required to verify that financial service advertisers are authorised by a recognised regulator before publishing their adverts. 

“This would prevent thousands of fake adverts from ever reaching the public,” she said. 

Russell said that the Irish Government has taken good steps in proposing legislative changes ahead of upcoming negotiations on the EU’s Payment Services Directive. 

“In a year when the EU is also looking at new proposals to support retail investing by everyday consumers, it needs to address the vast amount of online scams that will only discourage consumers from taking the leap into investing.

“The sooner that policy makers accept that the Digital Services Act alone is not the solution to this urgent problem … the quicker new protections can be rolled out to protect EU consumers and cut off a large revenue stream for criminality. Every day matters in the fight against criminal fraudsters,” she said. 

The Journal Investigates recently found that there is a massive web of fake shops targeting Irish Facebook users. 

We found that 100 pages have attempted to scam shoppers with more than 50,000 Meta ads. 

Yesterday, Irish economist David McWilliams warned against fake ads for fraudulent crypto investment schemes that have been using his image.