The main problem seems to be the sale of unregulated investments to ordinary people. The FCA seems to be moving at glacial pace to close down these types of operations. There is also a huge gap in consumer protection. If you invest in an unregulated product and it turns out to be a scam or extraordinary high charges squeeze destroy your capital, there is no compensation.

The big weakness in the legislation is that ordinary people can’t tell the difference between regulated products, regulated advice and a smooth operator in a suit with a fancy brochure and flashy website.

I have seen so many of these scams in my career but things seem almost worse now than pre 1986 …. Then financial editors were often the last line of defence and had to check every advertisement in print editions was genuine. before publication.

We stopped quite a few dodgy ads.

While the FCA was blamed in the programme, I do think Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook should have also been brought to book. These are the conduits through which today’s evildoers ensnare their prospects. Get tough Google et Al. Be smarter and faster than the crooks. Today they are still outwitting you.

Will we see, as Stephanie hints at, Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook being part of the solution rather than the problem?

Fact-checking on claims made in financial promotions made on social media is relatively easy to do. Could auto-moderation be a feature of these platforms in the future where the social media organisations do digitally what Stephanie used to do in print (prior to 1986)?

It’s very unlikely that these platforms would want to take on such a role ,but increasingly they are  seen as the distributors of ideas good and bad. How much longer before we are asking to see a lot more good and a lot less bad?