The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has launched a new online resource highlighting scam ads and texts that are becoming increasingly sophisticated and more costly.
The ASA’s ‘Scam Ads Info Hub’ is aimed at raising public awareness about the scams, helping people to spot the ads and to know where to report them.
Speaking on Today with David McCullagh, ASA Chief Executive Orla Twomey said scammers are “criminals” and the ASA does not have a role in “prosecuting or tracking them down”.
She said: “Every piece of information that we can put out there to help the public understand how to look at scams, and it’s not necessarily how to identify each one, but to be able to have this mentality of stopping, thinking, and checking if something is actually accurate.
“If it’s too good to be true it’s probably not true.”
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Ms Twomey said there is “such a myriad of scams” running to a “half-a-trillion dollars globally annually”.
She said the platforms on which some of the ads appear are among those who “do have a responsibility” to tackle the problem and they do “a lot of work in stopping things getting through”.
“But obviously things do get through because the scamsters are changing the way they do things,” she added/
She advised people who see something they think is a scam on social media to always report it to the platform, and that it can also be reported to the ASA and gardaí, “depending on what type of scam it is”.
“We’re not going to stop the scamsters because it’s such a valuable industry for them, but even if we can cut off a little bit of their pipeline, that would be helpful to the public,” she added.
