As part of their commitment to the Online Fraud Charter, Barclays calls for social media platforms to act fast and improve their overall verification of financial adverts process, as the volume of investment scams rose by nearly a third in 2023. In addition, this also accounted for the highest proportion of money lost to scammers by Barclay's current account clients.
Investment scams accounted for a third of all money customers lost to scammers, approximately 33%, which represent up 23% year-on-year. Of all scam types, investment and funding scams represent the greatest share of total claim values, with the overall volume of investment scams increasing by almost a third – 29%. The average investment scam claim was over GBP 14.000, which also increased to over GBP 16.000 for men.
A quarter of 18-34-year-old individuals spotted a suspected investment scam on social media, as almost a fifth have also been contacted via social about a purposed funding opportunity. The spike is being fuelled by fraudsters taking advantage of their ability to promote the overall unverified financial adverts on social media sites. At the same time, more than 6 in 10 (representing 61%) investment scams now take place on these platforms.
According to the official press release, a common trick that scammers will play is to get their victims in order to invest a small amount at the start. This process will return high rewards, which the fraudsters pay out from other victims’ money. In addition, this often convinces the individual that the investment is legitimate and in turn, leads to overall larger amounts being lost to the scammers, often over a long period of time.
In addition, as a testament to the importance of due diligence, data from the FCA’s customer helpline shows that there has been a sharp spine in investment scam-related calls, up to 193% in the last five years. The analysis also showed that investors have saved GBP 2 million by identifying when purported funding opportunities were too good to be true, whether by spotting spelling, grammatical, or formatting mistakes or by realising that the overall request for personal information was suspicious.
With a majority of investment scams currently taking place on their platform, social media websites must take responsibility in order to protect their customers. In addition, they are required to act on their promises and deliver a robust verification system in order to stop clients to be tricked into fraudulent investment adverts.
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