Facebook and other big tech are ignoring regulator’s demands to help rein in scammers

Meta is ignoring demands from Australian regulators to thwart scam investment ads from unlicensed publishers, highlighting the need to make that a mandatory requirement, ASIC says.

Tech giant Meta is ignoring demands from Australian regulators to force companies spruiking financial products to hold a ­licence, underscoring a move by the Albanese government to mandate new rules for social media platforms.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission, alongside the corporate regulator and the federal government, have raised efforts to stop the growing threat of scams in general, and investment scams in particular, as those accounted for about half of the $3bn lost to scams last year.

Google has committed to heeding the requests, but Meta’s Facebook and others have not, ASIC deputy chair Sarah Court said.

“Australia is one of two jurisdictions in the world as I understand it where we have managed to persuade Google to take that approach,” she told a panel at the Australian Payments Network Summit in Sydney on Tuesday.

“It took quite a piece of work but that is a significant outcome. Unfortunately we haven’t had any success with Facebook and some of the other social media platforms,” she added, without providing the names of the other platforms.

As a result of the commitment, Google has introduced a verification program for financial services advertisers in Australia that requires them to demonstrate they are authorised by ASIC.

The refusals to do the same at Facebook and others presented a challenge for regulators and highlighted the need for the government to introduce “some kind of mandatory obligations to deal with those issues,” Ms Court said.

The government is consulting on minimum standards to be ­embedded on industry-specific codes for banks, digital platforms and telecommunication providers that will be mandatory.

Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones. Picture: Gary Ramage

Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones told the forum the codes would raise the bar for the three main “corners” of the scam “supply chain” – banks, social media platforms and telecommunication companies. It would probably require social media plat­forms to verify their advertisers, he said.

“The right thing to do would be, for example, verify your advertiser. Verify the content so that it complies with the local laws of the jurisdiction – I don’t think that’s too much to ask,” Mr Jones said. “So that’s a clear obligation that you can very confidently foretell will be in our codes of practice.”

When asked whether the code for social media platforms would incorporate a requirement to comply with the ASIC request that Facebook has ignored, the minister nodded and said “It’s a no-brainer!”

“We want to work with all industry in a partnership approach but I don’t think it’s too much to ask some of the platforms that they do those two basic things,” Mr Jones said. “Whether you are a Meta, a Google, or any other platform, it will apply equally across all of them.”

In a statement, a Meta spokesman said scammers “presented a challenge in many environments, including social media”. He said Meta constantly tackled scams through technology “such as new machine learning techniques and specially trained reviewers, to identify content and accounts that violate our policies”.

“We are currently also working across industries and with the government to identify new ways to stop scammers.”

ASIC last month gained new powers to shut down fraudulent and malicious websites in a move it says will protect more people from scams and cyber crime.

Since July, ASIC has disrupted scam activity, shutting down more than 2100 investment scam and phishing websites.