Ms Derville Rowland:

It is a really important question. In a speech I gave this morning to an international audience I made the point that, according to Garda Síochána data, there has been a 393% increase from 2019 onwards in financial scams and frauds in the context of Ireland. I hope I have not got that figure wrong. I am leading a group at global level to try to bring a coalition of all financial regulators together to act with one voice because it is cross-jurisdictional. It is not an Irish problem; it is a global problem. It is often the case that the bad actors are boiler room scams located in other countries.

The role of the Central Bank specifically is a statutory one where we have an obligation to work to take down and disrupt advertisements of fraudulent financial offerings - committee members will all be aware of them pretending and masquerading to be a regulated entity, misusing its name and misspelling it slightly - and we do that. We are globally dealing with such a problem that it cannot be dealt with in the way it was dealt with previously. We still work to web scrape. It is one of the AI technologies we have. We have technology to go on the Internet because that is mainly where they are found. Once upon a time, we used to read the newspapers in Ireland and look at the advertisements there, but that is now less prevalent. We partner with An Garda Síochána to support it to disrupt bad actors.

We have been to see Google, for example. The Deputy will have seen that it announced a new initiative today. I am delighted that it is doing that. We asked it to do it. The director of enforcement and I went to see Google because increasingly the scams are online. We have also gone to Coimisiún na Meán to partner with it to become a trusted flagger so if we see incidents we can tell an coimisiún and we will have a priority corridor to take down advertisements and get to them.

We see our role as the statutory role, but that will not be enough. We have to link in with others who have a role in this and try to be collectively more effective. One of the international approaches that we are leading on is to get all financial regulators that are a member of IOSCO, an international securities regulator organisation, to work together to have a global database held by it of all the bad actors with straight-through processing in order that it can be easier for the Internet service providers to access that information and for us all to have a global reach with the Metas and Googles of this world so that they can help us to strengthen the approach. We also have a role in the national payments strategy. There is fraud thinking going on there.

Of course, the Deputy will probably be aware of the Government-led initiatives. We participate in some of those. We are not directly fighting those financial crime issues but we have a role to play and we try to play that in a collaborative way as well as our direct way.