COPYCAT websites which deceive consumers into thinking they are using a Government service are to face increased scrutiny, ministers have announced.
Consumer Minister Jenny Willott said Trading Standards would receive an extra £120,000 to clamp down on the websites that "try and palm themselves off" as Government sites.
It follows complaints that sites are exaggerating what they can provide and underplaying what consumers can get for free or at a lower cost from official sources.
Miss Willott said the funding would better equip Trading Standards to identify, investigate and take enforcement action against any misleading websites that pass themselves off as official Government services.
She said: "The unfortunate reality is that a minority are exploiting those who are perhaps less web-savvy and we need to clamp down on them."
Consumer group Which? said its research into 10 websites providing services for passport applications, European Health Insurance Cards (EHICs) and tax return services found them to be misleading or confusing, providing poor value for money and leaving some consumers up to £1000 out of pocket. Of the seven passport sites studied, Which? found examples where users could be misled into thinking they were on the official Government pages.
One site, passport.gb.com, welcomed visitors to the "UK Passport Application Service" while another site, britishpassportservices.co.uk, had an online form which was "extremely similar" to the official form.
Which? found UK-Passport.net to offer "poor value for money" because it checked passport applications for a fee of £72.50 when the same service was available at the Post Office for £8.75. Of the two EHIC sites looked at, it found europeanhealthcard.org.uk wrongly claimed it offered services unavailable through the NHS. It also found the web address of the nhs-e111-ehic.org.uk confusing as the use of NHS in the URL "may lead consumers to think they are using the official site".
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