Coimisiún na Meán awards Central Bank with ‘Trusted Flagger’ Status
Updated / Friday, 9 May 2025 15:13
As concerns continue to grow about the proliferation of financial scams, fraud and illegal content on online platforms, a new step was taken today to protect consumers.
The Central Bank of Ireland now has a more visible role in working with Coimisiún na Meán to manage illegal content online through its new status as a “Trusted Flagger”.
Gabriel Makhlouf, Governor of the Central Bank, said this formal status recognises “what we have been doing and we are going to carry on doing in terms of detecting illegal content, but it gives the staff here a bit more oomph behind them with this recognition.”
The concept, which is being rolled out across the EU under the Digital Services Act, identifies organisations who can apply to be “Trusted Flaggers”.
They are then empowered to identify, detect and notify illegal content within their area of expertise to online platforms, and the platforms are legally obliged to respond.
The online platforms must ensure that notices of the presence of illegal content, reported by Trusted Flaggers, are given priority and decided upon without undue delay or potentially face penalties.
When asked about consumers who have serious concerns about the potential exposure and impact of financial frauds on them, Mr Makhlouf said “It’s very serious, and this needs a lot of people working on it.”
“There are two aspects to this, financial literacy and making sure that the platforms are actually doing their bit to contribute to solving the problem,” he said.
When questioned about the responsibilities to protect consumers, he said that “regulators have a role a job to do, but I think the platforms have absolutely got a job to do here,”.
He added that “some of the platforms have shown greater willingness to work with us on this than others.”
The Governor also said that there is a need to ensure that “the political system understands the challenges here”, adding that politicians are “also need to keep pushing” the social media companies, and backing the regulators.
When Mr Makhlouf was asked about protections and safeguards for worried consumers who are being increasingly urged to use online banking for their day-to-day money management, he said he thinks the protections are there.
“There are two things to be honest. Firstly, personal responsibility. You need to protect yourself”, he said.
“You need to make sure that you follow the rules and if a provider is telling you x or y about authentication, you need to do that,” he stated.
The second thing consumers need to be aware of, he said is that “scammers are keeping up to speed on all of this, so things are changing,” the Central Bank chief said.
“You can’t say to people that all the ease and facility of online or telephone banking is something that should stop now because of fraud, and that we should all go back to using cash only because people want to live lives that they can live more easily,” he stated.
“If you think about the gazillions of transactions that happen just fine, it shows that we just need to protect ourselves and maintain focus on it which we as regulators are doing,” he added.
Mr Makhlouf said that he is however concerned about the development of AI, saying that AI is now making pretty spectacular frauds harder to detect.
John Evans, the Digital Services Commissioner, said that Coimisiún na Meán recognises that financial scams and fraud are a concern to the Irish public.
He said that with the appointment of the Central Bank as trusted flaggers, the team there now has a direct relationship with the major online platforms.
“We are legally obliging online platforms to ensure that any illegal online content reported by the Central Bank of Ireland, such as financial scams and fraud are prioritised by the platform and dealt with in a timely manner”, he noted.
Mr Evans added that with this announcement today that “we have a well resourced expert regulator and our hope is that the level of online fraud will be reduced as a result of this.”
The Central Bank have been granted the Trusted Flagger status for three years, and its designated area of expertise is financial scams and fraud, including the provision and/or offer of financial services without authorisation.
The appointment of Trusted Flaggers is an ongoing process and they will feed into Coimisiún na Meán’s identification of trends and issues via annual reports as well as having “a continuing dialogue” about the issues.
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