The Governor of the Bank of England (BoE) Andrew Bailey wants Google and other tech giants to be accountable to monitor and take down online financial scams, the Sunday Times reported. The move comes at a time when Indian regulators are also taking notice of online financial frauds and how to best combat the issue by making tech giants accountable to monitor the same. The Governor has been lobbying Home Secretary Priti Patel to introduce the measure under proposed Online Harms Bill, a Reuters report said of the Times story. It added that the development in the United Kingdom comes at a time where over £78 million was stolen from unsuspecting customers through fake investment websites last year, the report said. Since the proposed Bill forces tech giants to address online child grooming and terrorism related crimes, Bailey wants proposed legislation to be expanded to cover financial frauds as well. Throughout the course of 2020, there has been a mushrooming of digital lending apps in India some of which are unregulated entities and others' which use a licensed lender as a cover to provide pay-day loans. These apps are predatory fly-by-the-night operations that charge exorbitant fees and interest rates, and resort to extortion and blackmail tactics to collect payments from borrowers. As a result, a number of borrowers have committed suicide in the last few months. In 2020, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) received 1,509 complaints related to digital lending mobile applications in 2020, of which around 1,019 were…
