On Tuesday 23 September, the European Commission sent a request for information to four major tech companies - Microsoft, Apple, Booking and Google - asking them to detail the measures they are taking to combat online financial scams under the Digital Services Act (DSA).
This request, which concerns Apple’s App Store, Google Play, the online travel agency Booking and Microsoft’s search engine Bing, could potentially lead to a preliminary investigation.
The Commission is concerned that these services may be misused, citing the creation of deceptive applications that masquerade as official banking applications, or the use of search engines to disseminate links or advertisements for fraudulent sites.
“This is an essential measure to protect EU consumers against some of these practices and to ensure that platforms also play their part”, said Thomas Regnier, spokesperson for the European Commission.
The Commissioner for Technological Sovereignty, Henna Virkkunen, told AFP last week that, in the coming weeks and months, the EU would be closing several of the ongoing DSA investigations.
TikTok (see EUROPE 13641/12), X (see EUROPE 13560/4), Meta (see EUROPE 13411/1), as well as AliExpress (see EUROPE 13662/12) and Temu (see EUROPE 13516/9) have been under investigation for more than a year. (Original version in French by Isalia Stieffatre)