Fighting Fakes: What Can We Do Against Fake Products, Ads, Profiles and Sites?

Date of Event: 11 December 2025 Event: GASA Meet-Up

Digital deception is accelerating across online marketplaces, advertising ecosystems, social platforms, and websites. Counterfeit products, fake profiles, fraudulent ads, and cloned sites are no longer isolated issues, but part of increasingly organised scam ecosystems designed to scale quickly and evade detection. The GASA meet-up Fighting Fakes: What Can We Do Against Fake Products, Ads, Profiles and Sites? brought together experts from industry, technology, and global policy to examine how these threats are evolving and what practical action is needed to disrupt them.

Hosted by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), the session marked the final GASA meet-up of 2025. Opening the discussion, Jorij Abraham outlined GASA’s mission to protect consumers worldwide from online scams by bringing together governments, law enforcement, financial institutions, telecom operators, platforms, and cybersecurity providers. He emphasised the need to move beyond siloed responses and focus on shared intelligence, coordinated enforcement, and scalable solutions that can reduce harm before victims are impacted.

Speakers:

• Jorij Abraham, Managing Director – Global Anti-Scam Alliance

• Lucia Harris, Director of Member Protection – Match Group

• Ryan Woodley, CEO – Netcraft

• Sarah Ralston, Chief Product Officer – Proxyware, and Director of Privacy and Risk Solutions – The Media Trust

• Tal Goldstein, Head of Strategy, Centre for Cybersecurity – World Economic Forum

• Ihab Shraim, CTO – CSC Global

Across the discussion, speakers described how scam operations are becoming more organised, using shared tools, platforms, and infrastructure to scale their activities. Several panellists discussed how readily available tools are lowering barriers to entry for scammers and enabling faster and more scalable impersonation and phishing activity.

The panel explored how fake investment platforms, counterfeit shops, and impersonation scams are often enabled by compromised or abused digital infrastructure. Ryan Woodley drew on observations from ongoing monitoring to describe continued growth in phishing domains and the role of readily available tools in enabling convincing scam websites.

Several speakers discussed how scam activity is increasingly targeted, including towards vulnerable populations. Sarah Ralston discussed approaches used to identify and disrupt scams targeting high-risk groups, while Lucia Harris described how inducement-based investment scams are designed to build trust before larger losses occur.

The discussion also addressed enforcement challenges, including the difficulty of taking down scam infrastructure operating across jurisdictions and the unintended consequences of regulatory frameworks that can limit access to data needed for rapid disruption. Tal Goldstein highlighted the need for systemic approaches that reduce criminals’ access to infrastructure, improve information sharing between sectors, and raise awareness at senior leadership and policy-making levels.

Throughout the session, speakers returned to the importance of collaboration. No single organisation has visibility across the entire scam ecosystem, and effective disruption depends on shared intelligence, coordinated takedowns, and alignment between platforms, registrars, hosting providers, financial institutions, and law enforcement. Participants agreed that while technology will continue to evolve on both sides, coordinated action can slow the pace of harm and reduce the scale at which scams succeed.

Watch the full discussion below to explore how cross-sector collaboration is being used to counter digital deception and disrupt scam infrastructure at scale.