A number of household names, including Martin Lewis, Sir Richard Branson, Rob Brydon and Dawn French, have called on the Prime Minister to “urgently” include regulation for paid-for scam adverts within the Online Safety Bill.

In a letter to the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, the signatories, whose names and faces have frequently been mis-used by scammers to add legitimacy when targeting vulnerable people, urged the government to take action to protect savers.

The signatories were: Martin Lewis, Duncan Bannatyne, Sir Richard Branson, Deborah Meaden, Rob Brydon, Dawn French, Bear Grylls, Peter Johns, Lorraine Kelly, Davina McCall, Phillip Schofield, Bradley Walsh, Robbie Williams and Holly Willoughby.

In particular, the letter warned that current advertising rules were set up to police the “likes of soap manufacturers making false claims about how white they can clean sheets”, rather than “sophisticated, psychologically adept, digital organised crime, based around the world”.

It stated: “There are little powers out there to prevent online scam adverts or get recourse for victims.

"Regulators have few meaningful tools to punish platforms that get paid to publish them. It is therefore distressing that while your government has, thankfully, chosen to include user-generated scams in the Online Safety Bill, it has excluded paid-for scam adverts.

"This distinction between user-generated content and adverts is blurred in our digital age. This would result in the law covering someone making a scam post, but not if they pay to promote the same content. It seems a strange system.”

The letter also acknowledged that the government has said it will tackle scam adverts through changing advertising regulation, clarifying however, that this will be a “lengthy process of legislating in the face of fierce opposition from a powerful advertising industry”.

It warned that in the meantime, “huge swathes” of savers could see their financial, physical and mental health if they fall victim to these scams, suggesting that it could instead “quite simply” be tackled by being treated like user-generated online scams in the Online Safety Bill that is already going through parliament.

“Scammers’ ability to reach the public must be cut off. If you are serious about the concrete commitment you’ve made to deal with online fraud, please, let’s speedily start protecting the victims of scam adverts from the wolves – saving livelihoods and possibly also lives,” the letter concluded.

Calls for the inclusion of paid-for advertising in the bill have been growing over the past year, with MPs also previously writing to the Prime Minister to call for the bill to be amended.

The Financial Conduct Authority has also warned of limits in its power to combat online scams, while the Work and Pensions Committee chair, Stephen Timms, has argued that regulators remain "powerless" against paid advert scams.

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