EU study maps financial scams on online platforms

The European Commission published on 20 October 2026 a study on online financial scams, procured in 2025 to support its supervision and enforcement of the Digital Services Act (DSA). Carried out by Open Evidence and Spark Legal and Policy Consulting, it maps scam formats across online platforms and assesses ways to curb them; it does not evaluate compliance by the very large platforms and search engines.

The study groups scams into six categories: investment, romance, online shopping, employment and collaboration, unexpected gain, and disaster relief. Investment and romance scams are the most common and fastest-growing forms in Europe, and methods increasingly overlap across categories. It also finds that scams are facilitated by organized criminal networks that sell tools and services, lowering the barrier to entry.

The platform features examined include advertising and recommender systems, monetization, app stores and private messaging, inauthentic accounts and generative AI. Countermeasures fall into four groups: identity and know-your-business-customer checks at the gate, detection and removal, user-facing reporting tools, and platform policies with third-party cooperation.

Why it matters The finding that scams run on criminal markets for tools and services places fraud squarely in the cybercrime economy. For platforms under the DSA, gatekeeping at onboarding is described as the first line of defense; for investigators, the overlap between scam types means a case filed as one kind of fraud may share methods and suppliers with another.