FINTECH STRATEGIES

End-to-end encryption and large private group channels create an operating environment that is structurally difficult to monitor, and the research data demonstrates clear consequences – Telegram now accounts for one in five reported scams worldwide, and more than half of all job scams, a category that has itself tripled in volume over the past year.

TikTok’ s share of fraud cases has also increased sixfold year-on-year, still small in absolute terms, but a meaningful signal of where criminal attention is turning as the platform’ s user base grows.

In the UK, the dominant threat remains more traditional; purchase scams account for 54.9 % of all reported cases, a figure that has held relatively constant and speaks to vulnerabilities in routine consumer transactions rather than sophisticated financial deception.

Underpinning these trends is a commercial dynamic that the report is direct in identifying. Social media platforms generated an estimated £ 3.8bn in revenue from fraudulent advertisements targeting European users in 2025, a figure that sits alongside the 17 % rise in APP fraud volumes recorded by UK Finance in the first half of the same year.

That increase occurred after the introduction of a mandatory reimbursement regime, a policy designed to sharpen incentives across the payments ecosystem. The implication is clear: financial institutions are absorbing greater

of all UK fraud cases are purchase scams

of global scam cases are now job scams – up threefold year-on-year

liability while the platforms on which much of this fraud originates remain largely insulated from its costs.

The report’ s response to this misalignment is a set of policy recommendations timed to coincide with the UK Government’ s forthcoming Fraud Strategy. It calls for mandatory participation in crosssector data-sharing schemes, backed by enforcement action for noncompliance. It also leaves open the prospect of further regulatory intervention if the largest platforms fail to achieve meaningful reductions in fraud originating on their services. The argument is not new, but the weight of data assembled here gives it renewed force and a clearer evidential foundation.

fintechmagazine. com

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