Meta Expands Partnership with UK Banks to Fight Scams

Meta (formerly Facebook), an American multinational technology conglomerate based in California, on Wednesday announced the expansion of a first-of-its-kind information sharing partnership with banks to help protect people against fraud.

Meta’s Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIRE) is a threat intelligence sharing programme for financial institutions, allowing banks to share intelligence with Meta directly to use it to stop scammers and protect users.

NatWest and Metro Bank were the first banks in the UK to participate in this pilot. The feedback following the initial pilot stage has been positive and Meta will now on-board more banks over the coming months, Meta said.

Key successes from the initial pilot include the takedown of a significant concert ticket scam network attempting to target people in the UK and US.

Thanks to data shared between NatWest, Metro Bank and Meta during the six-month pilot, facilitated under the cross-collaborative umbrella of Stop Scams UK, Meta was able to remove approximately 20,000 accounts run by scammers from the 185 URLs shared, which in turn has helped the company to strengthen its fraud detection capabilities.

Nathaniel Gleicher, Global Head of Counter-Fraud at Meta, said that this work has already seen Meta take action against thousands of accounts run by scammers, indicating the importance of banks and platforms working together to tackle this societal issue.

“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,” Gleicher said.

Positive Response

The expansion of the pilot has been welcomed by many in the banking industry, as well as by the City of London Police and the National Economic Crime Centre, amongst others. FIRE is being welcomed as a key step in the fight against scams.

David Lindberg, CEO of Retail Banking, NatWest, said that spotting and stopping fraudsters before they target customers is the best way to address this growing problem.

“Partnering with Meta is an important step in tackling the epidemic of fraud and we welcome the opportunity to deepen our collaboration and ensure a cross-industry approach to fraud prevention and enforcement,” David added.

Metro Bank’s Chief Operating Officer Faisal Hussain said that scams are an industry-wide problem which require industry-wide solutions.

“We have been inspired by our work with Meta as an example of how we can all work together to protect consumers from faceless online fraudsters. Through sharing this information, we hope to significantly improve scam detection and enforcement, ultimately creating a safer digital environment for everyone,” he said.

Adrian Searle, Director of the National Economic Crime Centre, said that the expansion of Meta’s scam reporting channel, following a successful pilot, is welcome news – demonstrating a willingness to help tackle the scourge of online fraud, by bringing together data from across the bank and technology sectors.

He said that partnership between the public and the private sector is key to preventing this pervasive threat and we look forward to working with Meta, building on FIRE’s early success, sharing data across sectors to impact the Fraud threat at scale.