Consob: 720 websites blocked from 2019 for financial abusiveness

The annual report of the National Commission for Companies and the Stock Exchange. Interest in cryptocurrencies is growing, but characterized by high volatility. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, document analysis in three seconds instead of 20 minutes Jun 21st, 2022 A. S.

720 websites have been blocked by Consob for financial abusiveness since 1 July 2019. To make it known is the annual report of the National Commission for Companies and the Stock Exchange, which highlights an increase in investment proposals related to cryptocurrencies. "The power of obscuring – explains Consob – makes it easier to block access to websites through which abusive activities are carried out in Italy, without having to rely on the collaboration of the provider hosts who host them". As for activities related to crypto-assets, the Commission points to an increase in investment proposals in this sector, characterized by the promise of particularly high returns, which "in the vast majority of cases examined conceal real scams". To stand out in the field of crypto-assets are the offers of digital tokens "issued on the occasion of authentic or presumed initial coin offering (ICO) operations". To characterize the cryptocurrency cell sector, according to Consob's analysis, are the falling volatile prices, and a capitalization however contained in Italy compared to the stock markets, equal to 2.5% of the aggregate value of the S&P500 and the Stoxx Europe 600. According to data published by the Commission, from May 2021 to May 2022 the capitalization of cryptocurrencies amounts to 1,058 billion euros against 10,238 of the Stoxx Europe 600, 32,925 of the S&P500 and 51,872 billion of the Stoxx Global 1800. As for Bitcoin, the volatility has proved to be higher and the return lower than the values referable to some categories of non-digital assets. Volatility, for example, was 81% against 30% for oil, 17% for the S&P500 and 13% for gold. Finally, part of the report focused on the use and benefits of emerging technologies: thanks to artificial intelligence, for example, the time for reading and evaluating key investor information documents (Kids) will increase from 20 minutes to 3 seconds. "Although Kids are written in a concise and standardized format, their reading and evaluation takes at least 20 minutes. In order to compress working times, Consob together with the experts of the Department of Automatic and Management Engineering of the La Sapienza University of Rome has developed an analytical model for the extraction, collection and analysis of the information contained in the Kids. This model involves the combined use of two approaches, a method with standards and neural networks, for the extraction of data from texts and tables and the creation of a dataset that facilitates the comparative analysis of products and the monitoring of market dynamics. Thanks to the use of the software – explains Consob – which will be put into production at the end of the validation phase of the underlying algorithms and experimentation, the time of extraction and processing of information will be reduced to about three seconds per Kid".