Jakub Porzycki | Nurfoto | Getty Images
Facebook parent company Meta said Wednesday it is working with two leading banks in Britain on an information-sharing arrangement to help protect consumers from fraud.
Meta said it was expanding its Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIPE) to enable UK banks to share information directly with the social media giant, in a bid to detect and remove scam accounts and coordinate fraud schemes.
Meta said the technology has already been tested with multiple lenders in Britain. In one example, Meta says it was able to delete 20,000 accounts belonging to scammers involved in a concert ticket scam network that targeted people in the UK and US, thanks to data shared by UK lenders NatWest and Metro Bank.
NatWest and Metro Bank are the only banks in Britain currently part of the fraud intelligence sharing pact, but Meta says more will join later.
“This work has already seen us take action against thousands of accounts controlled by scammers, which shows how important it is that banks and platforms work together to tackle this societal problem,” Nathaniel Gleicher, global head of anti-fraud at Meta, said in a statement on Wednesday. a statement. .
“We can only defeat 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 worldwide,” Gleicher added.
Meta has long faced calls from banks in Britain to do more to stop scammers from spreading on their platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
In 2022, British digital bank Starling, which is backed by Goldman Sachs, began boycotting Meta and pulling ads from its platforms over concerns that the company was failing to tackle fraudulent financial advertising.
Meta’s apps are regularly abused by scammers who try to cheat users out of their money through various fraudulent programs.
One of the most common scams users encounter on the company’s platforms is authorized push payment fraud, where criminals try to convince people to send them money by posing as people or companies selling a service.
Meta already has policies in place that prohibit the promotion of financial fraud, such as loan scams and schemes that promise high returns. The company also prohibits ads that promise unrealistic results or guarantee a financial return.