Meta has announced the expansion of a scheme that sees banks sharing information with the social media giant to help protect people against fraud.
The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp had been working with NatWest and Metro Bank, but said it will now expand the scheme and enrol more banks.
Called the Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (Fire), the programme allows financial institutions to share intelligence with the tech giant directly to help stop scammers.
Meta said that during the pilot, a significant concert ticket scam network attempting to target people in the US and UK was taken down because of data shared between those involved in the scheme, with around 20,000 accounts removed, which were run by scammers across 185 URLs.
The social media giant said this in turn had also helped it strengthen its fraud detection capabilities.
“This work has already seen us take action against thousands of accounts run by scammers, indicating the importance of banks and platforms working together to tackle this societal issue,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Meta’s global head of counter-fraud said.
“We will only beat these criminals if we work together and share relevant information related to scams. Financial institutions can share unique information with us which we can in turn use to train our systems to take action against more scams globally.”
Mark Tierney, chief executive of Stop Scams UK, said: “We’re delighted to see some of our member banks join Meta’s Fire initiative in another positive example of cross-sector collaboration.
“We believe Fire could become a gamechanger for reporting fraudulent content, helping protect consumers and ensuring both banks and Meta gain better visibility of the abuse carried out on their systems by scammers.
“Stop Scams UK passionately believes that collaborative projects such as Fire can lead to wider data sharing and improve reporting which is key to successfully tackling scams.”
Rocio Concha, director of policy and advocacy at consumer champion Which? said it welcomed the scheme, but that more work still needed to be done in the area.
“While it’s a positive step that Meta is partnering with UK banks to combat scams, much greater collaboration between key businesses and government is needed to put an end to the fraud epidemic,” she said.
“Until now, the government and businesses such as online platforms, banks and telecoms firms have largely operated in silos and do not share the data they have on how these fraudsters operate – making it much harder to stop scams reaching victims in the first place.
“To tackle fraud, the Government should lead a more coordinated approach by encouraging sectors to share data and stop scams spreading.
“New duties, equivalent to the obligations being introduced for banks and online platforms, should be placed on telecom providers, online advertising providers and domain registrars to ensure they verify the legitimacy of users.”
