Meta Teams With UK Banks to Fight Scammers

Meta launched an anti-fraud information-sharing partnership with banks in the United Kingdom.

The Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIRE) is a “threat intelligence sharing program” that lets banks share information with Meta directly so the tech giant can use it to stop scammers, according to a Wednesday (Oct. 2) press release.

“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, global head of counter-fraud at Meta, said in the release. “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.”

NatWest and Metro Bank are the first financial institutions in the U.K. to take part in the program, and others are scheduled to join, the release said.

An early pilot of FIRE brought down a “significant concert ticket scam network” targeting people in the U.K. and the United States, according to the release. Data shared between the banks and Meta allowed the company to remove around 20,000 scam accounts.

“Scams are an industry-wide problem which requires industry-wide solutions,” Metro Bank Chief Operating Officer Faisal Hussain said in the release. “We’ve 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.”

New approaches to combating fraud in the card issuance ecosystem are needed, as criminals have grown more sophisticated and are using advanced technologies to steal card data or establish synthetic identities.

Late last year, the PYMNTS Intelligence report “The State of Fraud and Financial Crime in the U.S.” found that the costs of transaction fraud were climbing, averaging about $3.8 million for financial institutions in 2023, a 65% increase over the year before.

“For all manner of firms — but particularly smaller companies — the cost of taking fraud-fighting efforts in-house can be prohibitively expensive,” PYMNTS wrote this week. “Linking with payment networks and platforms can help streamline and bolster defenses.”