Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, whether he is taking steps to prevent the fraudulent copying of Government web pages to charge users for services.

Any misuse of GOV.UK’s brand elements (such as the logo, crown, and Government Digital Service (GDS) Transport typeface) is illegal, and these elements are protected by crown-copyright.

Digital, cyber security and brand protection teams across government work closely with the National Cyber Security Centre to detect and respond to fraudulent sites posing as government, and in doing so to protect the UK public from scams.

A range of monitoring tools and intelligence sources are used to identify these scams, and members of the public are encouraged to report these (e.g., directly to NCSC, or to the relevant government department). Government continues to improve these capabilities, as it will always remain challenging to reliably and rapidly detect all fraudulent sites.

Once detected, multiple techniques can be used to remove these sites from the Internet or otherwise reduce their impact on the public. This includes, but is not limited to, coordinating with industry partners to take down the web domain or remove the underlying systems hosting the site from the Internet, taking direct legal action, or escalating to law enforcement.