How Policymakers Are Responding to Online Scams: A Global Assessment
In recent years, the landscape of scams has shifted profoundly. Advances in payment technology, growing global connectivity and evolving criminal tactics have enabled scams to scale quickly and cross borders with ease.
Consumers bear the brunt of this, suffering financial and emotional damage, while the effects ripple across national and global economies. As more money gets diverted to criminal networks, trust in digital and financial systems erodes.
So what does a strong global response look like? In our view, it requires consistency and coordination.
Consistency, because a global response can only succeed if every nation plays its part. Building strong national foundations that meet an equal minimum standard is the essential first step.
Coordination, because it is vital that national strategies connect with harmonised global actions to protect people wherever they live.
Online scams are a cross-ecosystem crime, with consumers often exposed to risk long before a payment is made to a criminal behind a scam. Encouragingly, different parts of the digital ecosystem are increasingly taking steps to prevent fraud and scams – often in a more coordinated way and with greater involvement from governments and other actors in the journey.
One piece of the puzzle: measures driven by policymakers
Consumer representatives believe more can still be done, and they have called on policymakers to take the lead.
In 2025, we developed A Global Action Agenda to Protect Consumers from Online Scams. This call to action contains the checklist of measures that leading national consumer associations have defined as their minimum expectations of a strong global policy response. It identifies the policies and regulations that consumer representatives say are required – the consistency at a national level – and includes a corresponding global measure – the coordination at an international level.
Today, we release an analysis that looks at how this part of the puzzle is evolving. Stopping Online Scams: Building Consistency and Coordination for Consumers assesses how the policymaker-driven measures called for in the Global Action Agenda are shaping up around the world.
Looking at 28 jurisdictions, the report evaluates both the extent to which a measure aligns with the Global Action Agenda’s checklist, as well as the level of implementation of that measure.
The analysis is the latest in our series of tools supporting a global response to the affliction of scams. It can be used by governments, industry and consumer advocates to design, benchmark and inform their efforts to protect consumers.
Read Stopping Online Scams: Building Consistency and Coordination for Consumers
A Whole-Ecosystem Response Is Needed
While the report focuses on policymaker-driven measures, it also emphasises the roles of multiple actors in the scam ecosystem. A complete and effective response to online scams must extend beyond formal regulation to include voluntary coordination, data-sharing mechanisms, strong detection capabilities and incentives, and meaningful enforcement against criminal activity.
Many promising responses to scams are emerging worldwide – our report does not cover them all or assess their effectiveness. Forums such as the UNODC Global Fraud Summit – where we will share the report’s findings and bring the consumer voice – offer a valuable space for the ecosystem to learn, compare approaches, and discuss the full range of solutions that might exist.
Is the world delivering on the Global Action Agenda?
Our report shows that policymakers in all jurisdictions have taken some action under all four pillars of the Global Action Agenda. However, approaches differ widely and implementation is often incomplete. In other words, the consistency and coordination required is falling short.
The assessment highlights elements worth recognising and celebrating. All 28 jurisdictions have some measure in place to encourage consumer education – a commonly proposed solution, though it must be highly engaging to be effective. It is also positive to see that 27 of the 28 jurisdictions have legal frameworks enabling businesses to share relevant data safely with governments, law enforcement and trusted partners to protect consumers. This is often cited as a barrier to scam prevention, despite governments having issued guidance to encourage it.
At the same time, some gaps in the checklist emerge. Among the 27 jurisdictions with legal frameworks to share data, 15 have not yet fully implemented them. Ten jurisdictions lack national consumer portals with clear, consistent scams advice that links across sectors and platforms. And 11 jurisdictions have no measures in place to require online platforms to prevent scam content from appearing within their environments. This is a particular concern given the role social media plays in many scams. Fraudulent advertisements, fake investment schemes and false celebrity endorsements have made online platforms a so-called “golden goose for scammers”.
Next steps: closing gaps, measuring effectiveness and scaling up action
Consumers International recognises the growing burden on governments and the expectation to protect consumers from online scams in a complex, evolving digital environment. A successful strategy requires a whole-of-society response, including effective law enforcement and a combination of non-regulatory actions by multiple stakeholders.
Our assessment identifies four immediate actions policymakers could drive to close key gaps:
- Requiring online platforms to prevent scam content from appearing within their environments.
- Creating a national consumer portal with clear, consistent advice across sectors, as well as one-stop reporting centres that feed into national databases.
- Developing international coordination mechanisms to share scam intelligence and trigger alerts across borders, as well as cross-border agreements to recall or freeze funds when scam activity is suspected.
- Assessing whether existing consumer redress mechanisms appropriately provide redress for scams.
From here, more needs to be done to evaluate the effectiveness of individual measures.
Together with our global network of 200 consumer organisations, we stand ready to support the government agencies being called on to act. We will continue to advocate for meaningful, appropriate and ongoing resources to support their efforts.
Our Consumer Coalition to Stop Scams also provides a valuable forum for all stakeholders to connect the lived consumer experience of scams with the global response. We encourage interested parties to reach out to explore opportunities to work together on this critical issue.