DTI sweeps FB marketplace for ‘noncompliant’ merchants

INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) over the weekend said it found at least 37 Philippines-based sellers in Facebook’s marketplace noncompliant with the law, with violations ranging from failing to indicate prices for their products to having fake business permits.

The government agency said these sellers were tagged as such in only just a week’s worth of operations under their DTI Legit Check initiative, where they check the legitimacy of online sellers, hinting that these are but a fraction of the problem in online platforms.

“We have discovered many that have fake business registration. That is already falsification of public documents,” Marcus Valdez II, Director at the DTI’s Consumer Policy and Advocacy Bureau, said during the DTI Saturday morning radio program at the dzBB radio station.

Valdez said they have already referred some of these cases to the National Bureau of Investigation, with plans of working together with the Philippine National Police directly as well to speed up the process of catching online sellers with fake permits.

The DTI official said that aside from Facebook, they are also now going after these sellers in other online platforms, including Instagram, TikTok, Carousell, Shopee and Lazada.

Meanwhile, Trade Undersecretary Ruth Castelo said they are hoping that amendments to the more than 30-year-old Consumer Act of the Philippines as well as the passage of the proposed Internet Transaction Act can be fast tracked further so the law can keep up with the changes in the digital landscape.

She added that they are also hoping these two measures will be mentioned in the upcoming State of the Nation Address this month as priorities under the Marcos administration.

“If the President is the one who mentions it, everyone will rush to finish [these measures],” Castelo, who heads the DTI’s consumer protection group, said during the same program.