I'd like to thank Caroline for allowing me to contribute to her debate. Scams are essentially a breach of trust. They often cause embarrassment, where a victim will almost blame themselves for falling for the scam. Raising awareness of scams will of course greatly help to reduce the unwarranted stigma of being a scam victim, as well as going some way to encouraging the public to be on their guard, but one of the key ways of raising awareness is via prosecutions, which seem to be extremely rare.

In fact, earlier this year, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services said that there's an inconsistent approach to policing fraud in England and Wales, which has left the public at high risk of scams. In April, Wayne May, founder of Scam Survivors, a website dedicated to exposing fraudsters and helping victims, told the BBC that he sympathises with police. He explained that fraudsters often operate in different countries, so although a victim could lose everything they have, it would cost more to try and investigate it. Often, victims won't report the scams, not just because of the embarrassment, but because they've read stories online where the police have told victims that there's nothing they can do.

So, where could the answer lie if detecting and bringing prosecutions is so difficult and costly? Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook and PayPal all make huge sums of money and use sophisticated algorithms to profile people using their services. If you walk into some branches with your mobile phone in your pocket, Google will let the clerk behind the counter know which financial products you've googled recently and that they should therefore try to sell you. Of course, Google charge the banks for this service. Surely with all the monitoring Google, Amazon and the others do, they could be doing more to spot scams and those who are vulnerable to them. Perhaps we should explore forcing the big tech companies to do more, and look at holding them to account, at least in part, if one of their users falls victim to a scam. This problem largely comes about because of the online marketplace, and it seems only right that as we are rightly dealing with physical safeguarding, we should insist it is now time that those who make a fortune by putting people in contact with others online should have to take some responsibility to recover the losses of those who fall victim to scams as a result. So, I'd like to thank Caroline for bringing this debate. I fully endorse the debate—