Internet: Fraud

Mrs. James
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform what discussions he has had with the UK banking industry about combating fraudulent phishing e-mails which appear to originate from individual banks and financial service providers.

Mr. Timms
My Department has no direct remit for monitoring the banking sector. Informal contacts between officials take place from time to time in the wider context of work on information security. The Home Office works with the banking industry to help combat the problems of spam and phishing.

Mrs. James
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform what discussions he has had with internet service providers on reducing the quantity of fraudulent and unsolicited email sent to UK email addresses.

Mr. Timms
Many ISPs are taking active steps to prevent bad traffic reaching their customers and many have spam email boxes which enable their customers to complain about specific emails. Both Government and Ofcom are talking to the ISPs about how we might improve standards across the sector and how those improvements might be made more visible to end users. These discussions now need to reflect the recently published proposals from the European Commission regarding the review of the telecoms regulatory framework and which include recommendations designed to reduce the impact of spam.