“Too good to be true?" Protecting yourself and others from scams online

What can we learn from the UK Safer Internet Day 2025?

Over the course of the past 20 years, Safer Internet Day has become the UK’s biggest celebration of online safety, bringing together regulators, government, companies and, most importantly, children, to discuss how best to enhance digital safety. As hosts, the UK Safer Internet Centre seek to unite these parties around their ethos of internet safety for all by providing support and services to children and young people facing online harms, as well as support for professionals working with children.

What has made Safer Internet Day so dynamic and relevant since its foundation is its variation in focus area every year. This allows stakeholders and speakers to unite around a certain topic, assess the problem areas, and discuss how best to address these problems. In 2024, its ‘Inspiring Change’ theme came at the perfect time with the UK’s Online Safety Act coming into law late in 2023, and companies and users trying to navigate the impact of these changes.

Safer Internet Day 2025

In 2025, more specifically February 11, Safer Internet Day has chosen the following theme: ‘Too good to be true? Protecting yourself and others from scams online’. Each topic is decided upon in consultation with young people across the UK and this is clearly one which impacts young vulnerable consumers online as well as users from across all age groups, most notably the elderly.

Why is this topic so important online in 2025? Put simply, fraud accounts for 40% of all reported crime incidents in England and Wales and is the most commonly experienced and reported crime in the UK. More specifically, Action Fraud found that 83% of all the crimes reported in 2023 were cyber-enabled, most often through social media and encrypted messaging platforms. Ofcom research also found that 9 in 10 UK adults have come across suspected scams online with 1 in 4 losing money as a result. Indeed, Safer Internet Day mentions online financial extortion as one of the areas in which they will seek to raise awareness, not only of the financial implications but also of the impact it can have on users’ mental health.

Alongside discussing the scale of the issue and allowing young people to share their own experiences, Safer Internet Day will look into the future of scams by considering the following questions:

• How is changing technology like generative AI going to impact the approach of scammers?
• What role can the government and internet industry take to tackle this threat?
• What changes would young people like to see to help protect themselves moving forward?

The Role of Regulation

Particular attention should be paid to the role of the UK Government in tackling this threat. Ofcom, the UK’s Online Safety Regulator under the Online Safety Act (OSA), has already provided fresh insights into fraudulent behaviour online. The OSA text itself places duties on larger services to prevent users from encountering fraudulent advertisements and minimise the amount of time such fraudulent content is visible on the service.

There is also an overarching duty regarding managing the risk of ‘fraud’ as an illegal harm: companies must demonstrate how they are managing this risk. This approach has been complemented by several recommended measures from Ofcom, such as the inclusion of dedicated reporting channels for trusted flaggers to report fraud on services.

Much can also be learned from the EU’s approach to curbing scams and fraud online. The EU’s Digital Services Act requires platforms to know their business customers. This means that all traders active on online platforms in the EU must provide information to make them easily traceable by the platform before these traders can begin doing business on the platform. This information must then be verified and can be used to counteract fraudulent trading activity effectively.

The issue of online scams can be divided into four core parts which motivated the above know your business customer provision, and each can provide food for thought this Safer Internet Day:

• Illegal websites rely on essential everyday web services to operate, such as marketplaces and payment providers.
• Mainstream providers make millions in fees (for example, PayPal) from fraudulent business customers who provide unverified or inaccurate data on their identity.
• The absence of verification measures for business customers provides them with anonymity and prevents civil or criminal actions being brought against them.
• The previous EU rules required companies to list contact details but had no means of verifying the details provided (such as name, address, and contact details).

From this, we see how important transparency is in addressing scams and fraud: if users, platforms and regulators can easily trace back the details of those selling fraudulent goods, these online traders can be held accountable.

The Role of Digital Literacy and Education

However, alongside regulation, the value of dynamic and flexible digital literacy measures to empower users to recognise and avoid scams and fraud is crucial. This is acknowledged in both the UK and EU rulebooks; providing users with preventive tools and skills also helps to recalibrate the power imbalance between users and services. Safer Internet Day underlines this by providing a variety of tailored resources. These include educational resources such as worksheets and quizzes for young people as well as top tips for both parents and youngsters.

These can help develop some practical and simple habits for younger users to understand when things are too good to be true and what kind of cross-referencing measures they can take to confirm the suspected content is indeed fraudulent. From a redress and user empowerment perspective, it is important to underline the value of these resources encouraging young people to report fraudulent content.

Finally, the Safer Internet Day literacy resources also highlight common examples of how scams are most commonly presented to users, including:

• Emails with a suspicious link
• Texts claiming to be from our bank
• Pop-ups telling us we have been a lucky winner

Given the vast number of new scams which emerge across email, social media, text, phone calls, and WhatsApp every day, the ‘future of scams’ segment of Safer Internet Day is sure to develop upon this initial list above so that vulnerable users have an up-to-date toolkit to tackle the most recent examples of scams and fraud.

Key Takeaway

In this age of digital regulation and rapidly evolving online safety issues, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the variety of issues impacting internet users. As we understand at The Internet Commission, pushing the conversation forward regarding the most significant topics must include input from those stakeholders who are most pivotal for positive change: users themselves. Safer Internet Day provides an opportunity for users and other stakeholders to unite around one pressing issue and this year’s topic of protection against online scams offers the chance to do this.

The impact this issue has on vulnerable users, such as the young, elderly, and disabled, enhances the urgency for platforms, regulators, children and parents to engage with Safer Internet Day. Aside from the digital literacy benefits for users, the day also provides an excellent opportunity for companies to understand how the UK Online Safety Act can be complemented by digital literacy measures and by engaging with these vulnerable user communities directly.