Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 24 October 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Authorised Push Payment Fraud: Discussion (Resumed)

Mr. Philip Milton:

I am not aware of those specific proposals but, to echo what Mr. Ó Broin said, our money is best spent to try to prevent this stuff from happening and working in collaboration with the banks to do that. Rather than focusing on who should pay for what, we should focus on solving the problem and working together to do that. Mr. Ó Broin has outlined the level of investment that we already put in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening. As he said in his opening statement, that is only increasing over time, not decreasing. That question is legitimate if there is a sense that there is not a financial incentive for organisations like ours to engage in this and try to fix the problem. It is clear, however, that there is a significant financial incentive for us because, as Mr. Ó Broin outlined, the risk to us is substantial. Our users and advertisers that advertise on our platforms are the lifeblood of our platforms. Fraud on our platforms, even if one does not fall victim to it, makes people not want to use our platforms, whether advertisers or users. That is the death knell for a platform like ours, so there is a huge motivation for a company like ours to solve this as an issue.

Things get through our protections and always will because this is an adversarial space and we are talking about highly organised criminal gangs which are incentivised to do all they can to get under the bars of our standards and policies so they can run ads or post content on our platforms. Our focus is on trying to invest to stay one step ahead of those criminals. That is where our focus has been over the last few years.

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