Social Media: Scam Adverts and Fraudulent Content

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, it is becoming increasingly apparent that overseas, in different countries, there are huge numbers of almost industrial-scale scams going on. Will the new fraud strategy include a way of tackling some of the international problems that we have? Is my noble friend the Minister liaising with some of those countries where we know that this is a really prevalent activity?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for that. The Government have already signed a United Nations resolution against fraud, and we are hosting a conference in Vienna in March next year to try to bring together international action on the very issues that my noble friend has mentioned. Independently, I went to Nigeria in April this year and signed an agreement with the Nigerian Government on fraud and scammers, my right honourable friend the Prime Minister has done one with Vietnam recently, and we intend to expand that further to other key nations. It is vital that we have international co-operation to tackle areas where scammers are operating from, very often against the will of the host Government.