The European Union officially demanded from four digital giants, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Booking Holdings, presenting detailed information on their activities aimed at financial fraudsters, which cost Europeans over EUR 4 billion a year.
The European Union goes to war with fraudsters
The EU Technology Commissioner Henna Virkkunen wants the technological giants to transfer Brussels how to deal with false banking applications or false accommodation offers. It is an attempt to force the largest companies from the digital market to start to fight the fraud that operates on the web more effectively.
In addition, the European Commission will examine how Apple and Google control their applications stores in terms of placing false programs in them, in particular counterfeit banking applications, whose goal is to steal user data. Google itself removed about 11,000 applications per day in 2024. 55% of these applications violated privacy and reduced users’ security, and 9% were simply cheater programs.
Search engines supported by Google and Microsoft will now be inspected in the field of “tossing” users of search results that direct them to fraudsters. In turn, Booking Holdings will have to explain how it copes with false accommodation offers.
Is it just about politics?
Everything takes place during the period of severe transatlantic tensions regarding the regulation of digital companies. President Donald Trump threatened to impose additional duties to countries that attack American companies. So is it about politics, not the good of users?
We see that more and more criminal activities are taking place on the web. We must ensure that online platforms actually make all efforts to detect and prevent this type of illegal content
– Virkkunen said and added that artificial intelligence made modern fraud more sophisticated and more difficult to detect.
The conclusions of current analyzes may provoke the start of a formal investigation as part of an act on digital services, which applies to platforms that have over 45 million users inhabited in the European Union. The Commission currently supervises 25 large digital platforms.
