The Payments Association, a United Kingdom-based trade body representing the payments sector, is calling for a “shared responsibility regulatory framework” after releasing a white paper on Tuesday that revealed two-thirds of the £250 million ($330.2 million) lost to Authorized Push Payment (APP) scams in early 2025 originated on digital platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
The Association’s white paper, titled “The New Origin of APP Fraud,” examined the role digital platforms such as Meta’s (NASDAQ: META) Facebook play in exposure to APP fraud, one of the most prevalent financial frauds, whereby a criminal manipulates, deceives or persuades a victim into making a digital payment or transferring funds to an account controlled by the criminal.
According to the report, £450.7 million ($ 595.11 million) was lost to APP fraud in the U.K. in 2024, with £257.5 million ($340 million) recorded in the first half of 2025. Meanwhile, across the European Economic Area (EEA), which includes all 27 European Union countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway, fraudulent credit transfers are estimated to total between €2.2 and €2.5 billion ($2.52 and $2.87 billion) annually.
Based on interviews with major financial institutions, including Barclays (NASDAQ: BCS), Revolut, Nationwide, and Santander UK (NASDAQ: SNTUF), the report highlighted growing concern across the sector that banks are being forced to bear the cost of fraud originating on major digital platforms, despite that “in most cases, scam exposure occurs online.”
Based on its research, the white paper outlined how a majority of APP fraud begins long before a transaction is initiated, often starting with fraudulent advertisements on Facebook or Instagram, and often migrating into private messaging channels such as WhatsApp and Telegram.
“Victims frequently first encounter fraudulent advertisements, marketplace listings, or messages on digital platforms long before any payment instruction reaches the banking system,” read the report. “In the first half of 2025, 66% of reported cases began on online platforms.”
However, it went on to argue that, while banks face mandatory reimbursement rules, “tech giants remain exempt from financial liability for the scams they host, leaving the payments sector to unfairly bear the cost of digital platform negligence.”
For this reason, The Payments Association announced that it is calling on the U.K. government and regulators to prioritize the enforcement of standards for social media giants, to stem the tide of financial crime.
“For too long, the polluter has not been the one paying,” Riccardo Tordera, Vice President of Policy and Government Relations at The Payments Association, said in a statement. “While banks are working tirelessly to reimburse victims and detect suspicious transfers, they are essentially trying to catch water at the bottom of a waterfall while the source remains wide open.”
He added that “as Meta’s ecosystems have become a primary engine for scam exposure, we are calling on the government to move beyond voluntary pledges and toward mandatory, enforceable standards for digital platforms to protect consumers from PP’s point of origin.”
Since October 2024, rules from the U.K. Payment Systems Regulator require banks to refund victims up to £85,000 ($112,230), unless there is gross negligence, with liability shared between sending and receiving payment providers. Meanwhile, the Online Safety Act 2023 requires online platforms to reduce and remove fraudulent content, but there is no duty to reimburse.
Likewise, in the EU, liability is primarily also placed on payment service providers, especially where fraud prevention measures fail.
However, under new rules agreed by EU lawmakers last November, platforms including Meta and TikTok could be held liable for financial fraud for the first time. Lawmakers agreed that banks should still reimburse victims if a scammer, impersonating the bank, cons them out of their money, or if payments are processed without consent, but social media companies will have to compensate banks if it’s clear that they failed to remove an online scam that had been reported.
These rules have yet to be implemented, but when they do, they will go some way toward the reform being called for by The Payments Association.
In terms of specifics, the Association’s white paper outlined a framework for shared liability that would address what it sees as “systemic failings,” including mandatory identity verification for advertisers and the implementation of defined response timelines for removing fraudulent content.
The Payments Association also said it is advocating for the introduction of financial repercussions for platforms that repeatedly fail to prevent scam exposure, alongside a requirement for real-time intelligence sharing between tech firms and the payments industry.
It added that: “Without these interventions, the Association warns that the UK’s fraud crisis will continue to scale, leaving the financial system and the general public to bear the multi-million-pound consequences of digital platform negligence.”
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Source: https://coingeek.com/uk-payments-body-urges-platforms-to-help-front-app-fraud-costs/
