Online safety – are we being scammed?
Oliver Hayes, Head of Policy and Campaigns
Estimated reading time 2 minutes
When I hear the term ‘online scams’, I think of vulnerable elderly people being tricked into sharing passwords or allowing remote access to their computers.
It never occurred to me that young people were at risk, but in the last year nearly one million 11-16 year olds have been scammed online, according to new research from Vodafone.1
On average they’ve been fleeced out of £103 – a huge amount for most people that age – but testimony from young people and their parents reveals that the emotional toll is even worse.
I was really distraught. I was crying about it, because it's not even like, oh, it's my own money. It's my parents' money.
Young person who shared her experience of being scammed aged 14
Scams do not happen in a vacuum. They are facilitated by a social media business model that gives scammers and fraudsters everything they need.
Platforms encourage us to publicly reveal our entire contacts list. They push us to post, comment and share as if our life depends on it, employing ‘persuasive design’ techniques borrowed from the gambling industry to trigger feelings of FOMO or ‘compare and despair’, driving us to constantly ‘engage’ online, often against our better judgement.
This engagement generates a digital treasure trove of personal information that scammers couldn’t dream of accessing in the analogue world.
“Fall prey to a scam? It’d never happen to me”
Most of us believe we’re immune to scams just as we think we’re impervious to advertising.
But advertising works – not because marketers know exactly what you or I want, but because they know what people just like me have and haven’t bought. It’s a game of probability.
The same is true of scams. Every bit of information that a platform encourages us to reveal about ourselves tips the scales further in favour of scammers intent on relieving us of our cash and, more to the point, sense of safety and security.
Who’s to blame?
Scammers must, of course, be held responsible for their actions; no-one is forcing them to behave with such moral or legal abandon.
But better regulation of social media would change the game.
Governments could and should force social media to prioritise user safety over ‘engagement’ at all costs. History shows us that platforms won’t do this voluntarily because maximising engagement is the key to maximising profits, so it’s down to the State to intervene.
Safety by design
Right now, regulators in the UK are deciding how to implement the ‘Online Safety Act’, a law primarily intended to protect children from illegal and harmful content. But as campaigners have long argued, the key to achieving this is reforming how content is delivered – recommender algorithms, persuasive design features etc. – rather than trying to police individual posts.
Enforcing the law this way – compelling platforms to mitigate the harm caused by apps’ features and functionalities – would offer far better protection against scams just as it would against hateful or dangerous content.
Help spread this message by emailing your MP today asking them to help make the internet safe and protect children from scams.
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The parent and child research was conducted by Censuswide with 1,000 Parents of 11-16 year olds and 1,000 11-16 year olds (Nat Rep) between 30 January 2025 and 3 February 2025. Censuswide abide by and employ members of the Market Research Society which is based on the ESOMAR principles. Censuswide are also members of the British Polling Council.