Dishonest business practices based in false or misleading communications that can lead to scams are becoming increasingly common. Small businesses are generally more vulnerable to this type of frauds and have also more difficulties to react if they are victims of such scams. In order to tackle these kind of behaviours, the European Commission has adopted a series of actions that will inform a legislative proposal in 2013.

The European Commission has adopted its Communication about protecting businesses against misleading marketing practices and ensuring effective enforcement. This strategy contains a number of measures whose objective is twofold. First, they are aimed to review and strengthen the rules against certain practices and, second, to strengthen the rules prohibiting misleading marketing practices in cross-border cases.

The strategy now launched by the Commission comes as a response to a large amount of complaints received by the European Parliament from businesses that had been victims of misleading marketing practices and is also the result of the responses received to the public consultation on misleading practices launched by the Commission by the end of 2011. The Communication focuses on commercial practices which include some misleading advertising and marketing techniques, such as the very common communications which are supposedly only aimed at updating some contact and commercial details but turn out into scams.

The measures proposed by the Commission to address these behaviours include the explicit prohibition of certain practices which are clearly misleading, like misleading directory companies. The clear prohibition of these activities will be accompanied by an effective and proportionate penalty regime that will also act as a deterrent for potential offenders. It also includes the appointment of an enforcement authority in each Member State as well as a process of cooperation between these authorities.

The European Commission intends to present a proposal to revise the Directive on misleading and comparative advertising in 2013 in order to tackle these practices which produce significant damage for businesses in their B2B trade relations.