Social Media Scam Takedown- The Next Frontier for Anti-Scam Utilities
By Dr. Kimmo Soramäki (Founder & CEO)
The global fight against fraud is shifting. While financial institutions have historically focused on the transaction layer, tracing money, freezing accounts, and identifying mules, the “top of the funnel” has remained largely untouched. Social media platforms, search engines, and messaging apps have become the primary hunting grounds for modern fraudsters, who use these networks to identify victims, share intelligence, and execute sophisticated grooming campaigns before a single cent leaves a bank account.
The Social Media “Hunting Ground”
Today, scammers utilise social media not just to communicate, but to industrialise the process of finding victims. Platforms are used to:
Identify Victims: Scammers use behavioral data and public posts to target vulnerable individuals for romance scams, investment fraud, and pig-butchering (cryptocurrency confidence fraud) schemes.
Share Intelligence: Criminal networks use these platforms to trade scripts, mule account details, and “sucker lists” of previous victims.
Carry Out Scams: From deepfake celebrity endorsements to fake e-commerce storefronts, the scam often begins and matures entirely within the “walled garden” of a social app before any money moves.
The Profit Motive: A Multi-Billion Dollar Blind Spot
Historically, online platforms have operated with limited liability regarding the fraudulent content they host. This regulatory gap has created a perverse incentive structure in which platforms profit directly from traffic generated by organised crime.
Leaked internal documents reported by Reuters suggest that in 2024, Meta may have generated up to $16 billion in revenue specifically from fraudulent advertisements. If accurate, this would account for nearly 10% of their total revenue. The same documents indicate that users on these platforms could be exposed to an estimated 15 billion high-risk scam ads daily, running from fake e-commerce storefronts to deepfake investment schemes.
A Legislative Turning Point: DSA and DMA
The introduction of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) fundamentally alters this landscape within Europe, setting a new global benchmark for enforcement that National Anti-Scam Utilities (NASUs) can harness or emulate.
The DSA redefines the responsibilities of online platforms regarding “illegal content,” explicitly including consumer scams. Two provisions are game-changers for NASUs:
“Actual Knowledge” and Liability: Platforms can no longer feign ignorance. If they are made aware of specific illegal content and fail to remove it, they lose their liability protection and can be held financially responsible for the resulting harm.
Know Your Business Customer (KYBC): Online marketplaces must verify traders’ identities, making it harder for scammers to set up anonymous fake shops.
Trusted Flagger: The DSA mandates that platforms create priority channels for “Trusted Flaggers”, designated entities with proven expertise in detecting illegal content. Notices submitted by these entities must be processed with priority and without undue delay.
While the DSA handles content, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) targets “Gatekeepers” (e.g., Apple, Google, Meta). By enforcing transparency and interoperability, the DMA allows external researchers and agencies to better scrutinise app stores and advertising ecosystems, making it harder for fake banking apps and malware-loaders to hide within legitimate marketplaces.
A Future Opportunity for NASUs as “Trusted Flaggers”
This legislation charts a clear future direction for NASUs to add an active enforcement role on the digital front line.
By obtaining “Trusted Flagger” status (or its jurisdictional equivalent), a NASU can operationalise a rapid-response takedown capability that closes the loop between victim reporting and scam prevention.
Immediate Takedown: When a NASU identifies a scam network via financial tracing (e.g., a mule account linked to a specific investment ad), it can issue a “Trusted Flagger” notice to the platform. Unlike a standard user report, this legal notice would trigger a priority review, resulting in the removal of the fraudulent ad or profile within minutes rather than days.
Triggering Liability: By including detailed evidence of the modus operandi and financial harm in their reports, NASUs provide platforms with “Actual Knowledge.” This effectively forces the platform to act or face direct liability for any subsequent losses incurred by victims who interact with that content.
Cross-sector Disruption: This approach creates a “pincer movement” against fraudsters, freezing their funds at the bank (using eg, FNA Money Trails) while simultaneously dismantling their recruitment channels on social media (using Trusted Flagger Protocols).
For National Anti-Scam Utilities (NASUs), the next strategic frontier is not just following the money, but stopping the signal.
