Commission publishes DSA study mapping online financial scams and platform countermeasures
The European Commission has released a commissioned study mapping how financial scams spread across online intermediary services, including VLOPs and VLOSEs, and what platforms can do to stop them. It is a supervisory input under the Digital Services Act, not a compliance assessment. For anyone running trust-and-safety or financial-crime functions at a large platform, it signals the evidence base the Commission will draw on in future enforcement.
- The study was published on 20 October 2026 and procured by the Commission in 2025 to support DSA supervisory and enforcement tasks.
- It categorises online financial scams into six types and finds investment and romance scams the most common and fastest-growing in Europe.
- Four countermeasure categories are identified: access and gatekeeping, detection and removal, user-facing measures, and platform-level policies and third-party cooperation.
- The study, by Open Evidence and Spark Legal and Policy Consulting, does not evaluate compliance by providers of VLOPs and VLOSEs.