SEBI has been noticing a sharp rise in frauds happening across social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, X (Twitter), Telegram, and even app stores. Scammers are attracting people with trading courses, fake testimonials, and big promises of guaranteed returns. This raised serious concerns about investor safety and the growing misuse of social media influence in the securities market.
To tackle this, SEBI decided to step in and released a circular today outlining new guidelines for all SEBI registered intermediaries running advertisements on social media platforms.
SEBI’s plan to tackle this:
• Fraudsters are misusing social media to run deceptive market schemes targeting retail investors.
• SEBI, along with Google and Meta, has made advertiser verification mandatory.
• Registered intermediaries must update their email and mobile on the SEBI SI Portal by April 30, 2025.
• Ads will be allowed only after verification of these details by the platforms.
• This ensures that only verified intermediaries can run ads, reducing fraud and misinformation.
What changes for social media influence?
This move hopefully cuts down all the random, unverified financial content flooding social media. It means most investment ads you see will be from verified players, making it harder for fraudsters to sneak in.
Over time, people might start trusting content from credible sources, and even social media influencers or finfluencers could actually set the right expectations for viewers from the start.
Here’s the circular:
What’s your thought on this? Do yu think it’ll help clean things up a bit?