Ms Derville Rowland:

We can take a number of actions depending on the circumstances. The normal course of action is to warn consumers about the firms, publish the warning notices and require that the websites be taken down where we can act on them. The other thing we do very effectively, and which we have done a lot this year, is work with An Garda Síochána. We are talking about fraud whereby people are asked to pay money for things that are not going to happen. There is an uptake in advance-fee fraud whereby people are told that if, for example, they pay €250 now, they will be pre-approved for a loan and get a loan of a much larger amount. Where we see such activity, which is fraud, we report it.