Most scammers find their victims, at least initially, online these days, whether it be through website ads or social media.

With this in mind it was good to see this week that a ban on paid-for scam adverts has moved a step closed.

Social media companies and search engines will become responsible in future for preventing paid-for scam adverts on their platforms under a new amendment to the draft Online Safety Bill.

Assuming this amendment is not dropped and the bill becomes law it will place a major onus on these firms to stop the scammers.

I’ve been critical in the past of the role Google and others have played in allowing - or rather not stopping - scam adverts from appearing.

To give Google its credit it has now moved significantly to clamp down on these scam adverts, nudged along by the FCA.

I suspect if the new measures in the bill had been in place a few years ago we would likely have never seen the disaster that was the London Capital & Finance £237m mini-bond collapse, and many of the others that have plagued the sector for many years and made it so hard to build up trust in financial services.

The reason so many consumers do not trust financial advisers and the financial services sector generally is that too many people get cheated, ripped off and conned out of their money by a relative handful of scoundrels.

Until now these scoundrels have been allowed to get away with it, deliberately targeting the vulnerable and naive online. They simply pay a few quid to run an ad on a search engine or social media platform and their ads are seen by millions, some of them only too willing to hand over their savings in return but a better return.

Promises of unrealistic returns and fake guarantees lure consumers who see these ads alongside quality journalism and other trusted information. They struggle to work out one is trusted information and the other is a scam if they appear on the same web page.

That is changing now and the Online Safety Bill will be welcome progress. It will not stop all the scam ads, those originating overseas will be harder to tackle, but it is a sound move.

We just need to tackle the so-called social media influencers pumping out bucket loads of rubbish financial advice, from bogus stock tips and crypto nonsense, to make further progress.

I do not think that trust in financial services will return overnight but there is a chink of light in what has been a dark jungle.

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Kevin O’Donnell is editor of Financial Planning Today and a journalist with 40 years of experience in finance, business and mainstream news. This topical comment on the Financial Planning news appears most weeks, usually on Fridays but occasionally other days. Follow @FPT_Kevin • If you have not yet registered for Financial Planning Today as a subscriber please do so now. It's free to sign up.