The Greek Ministry of Development and the tax authorities have recently turned their focus on Influencers’ activities, investigating whether content creators comply with consumer law.
The Tax Office has taken to a number of social media platform such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to look for cases of illegal sales, undeclared income and false businesses.
The list under inspection includes people popular among the youth, artists, presenters, models, athletes, but mainly people who reach their audiences in the first place through platforms (e.g. TikTok) and then through traditional media.
The aim of the audits is to identify posts that contain testimonials, reviews or listings that may mislead consumers, influencing their purchasing behavior and causing financial loss, and secondly to verify whether influencers explicitly inform their followers about their company’s identity and contact information.
Professional influencer, Filio Tsinoglou, known by her handle “FIlio_lou”, mentions to MEGA television that “I consider myself an advertising agency or a freelancer…I started the process of opening everything that is needed to be legal and correct in this regard 7 years ago.” She creates content mainly for parents, promoting products aimed at both them and their children, and has 340k followers.
She explains that the price for an ad is determined by each influencer. “There are packages, everyone prices themselves as much as they think they deserve, based on the numbers they bring in and the number of clicks they get. So the money depends on the influencer.”
The more followers someone has, the more freedom they have over what content to create. The prices for a post can start “from 100 euros up to 7,000,” while incomes can start from 1,000 and reach 20,000 euros per month.
