Last week, the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) published a “Dear CEO” letter to tech firms which describes its plans to publish data about the firms that are most commonly reported as enabling contact between fraudsters and victims.

The PSR refers to its work on requiring mandatory reimbursement for victims of authorised push payment (APP) fraud and says that, in addition, ”we want to strike at the heart of the problem to stop fraud occurring in the first place".  To do this, it needs to understand more about how fraudsters contact victims and earn their trust.

This year, the PSR used its powers to require the 14 largest banking groups in the UK to provide data reported by victims on fraud committed in 2023. That data includes the frequency of fraudulent activity reported as being enabled via certain tech firms' platforms or services, as well as through other providers.

It plans to publish this data in the week beginning 9 December 2024 and has sent each relevant firm information about how it has performed and how it ranks compared with other providers. It says that the main benefits of publishing the data are:

  • raising consumer awareness;
  • raising consumer vigilance;
  • providing useful insights; and
  • highlighting the platforms and services that are most often exploited by fraudsters.

The PSR says it plans to rank firms by the number of times they were reported by fraud victims as an enabler, using various fraud types, such as investment, purchase, romance fraud or impersonation. It may also publish rankings of firms by specific sectors or sub-sectors, such as the most common enabler recorded among listing or auction sites, the most common among social media platforms, and so on.  

The PSR refers to the platforms and services that fraudsters use to contact victims and persuade them to make payments as "fraud enablers". It defined ‘an enabler’ as an entity that a victim reported as either a platform or service through which the fraudster made contact with the victim, or a website or platform where the victim saw an advertisement or profile that led to an APP scam

The PSR invites firms to comment on the plans by 4 December 2024.

It proposes to publish fraud enabler data every year.