On Wednesday, Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, announced a partnership program with U.K. banks to share fraud data for purposes of, for example, removing accounts on the platform that are run by scammers.
The program, named the Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange, or FIRE, kicked off six months ago in a pilot stage facilitated by Stop Scams UK, a private sector not-for-profit company that leads cross-industry collaboration against scams between banking, telecommunications and technology.
During the pilot stage, two banks shared fraud data with Meta: NatWest and Metro Bank. The intel enabled the social media platform to take down 20,000 accounts run by scammers, including Facebook and Instagram accounts, based on information from 185 URLs shared.
Creating a Facebook or Instagram account, as with most social media platforms, only requires an email or phone number. While Facebook's policies technically require users to use their real name to sign up, enforcement is mainly complaint-based; new account holders do not typically need to verify their real name. This makes it relatively simple to create multiple accounts to proliferate the same scam.
In 2021, social media was the single biggest starting point for scams against Americans aged 18-59; 31% of people in that age range who reported losing money to a scam said that the scheme started on social media, according to
The feedback from the FIRE pilot has enabled the platform to secure commitments from additional banks "scheduled to join," according to
"We will only beat these criminals if we work together and share relevant information related to scams," said Nathaniel Gliecher, global head of counter-fraud at Meta. "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."
The ABA is testing an information-exchange network to allow banks to share their fraud data with each other. Companies including Baselayer are also building solutions.
NatWest and Metro Bank executives said such cross-sector collaboration is important to fraud prevention.
"Partnering with Meta is an important step in tackling the epidemic of fraud," said David Lindberg, CEO of retail banking at NatWest. "We welcome the opportunity to deepen our collaboration and ensure a cross-industry approach to fraud prevention and enforcement."
Metro Bank's Chief Operating Officer Faisal Hussain echoed the sentiment, adding that information sharing with Meta will hopefully "improve scam detection and enforcement" significantly.
Adrian Searle, director of the National Economic Crime Centre, said the pilot's expansion was "welcome news."
"It follows the establishment of the Online Fraud Charter in 2023, in which leading tech companies signed a voluntary agreement, recognising and seeking to reduce the risk of fraud and financial exploitation of UK citizens on their platforms," Searle said.
Nik Adams, temporary assistant commissioner of the City of London Police, also cited the Online Fraud Charter as pivotal to the launch of FIRE and praised Meta's scam reporting channel.
The Online Fraud Charter is a voluntary agreement between the U.K. government and large technology companies, including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, X and
The charter compels signatories "take a proactive approach to implementing new technologies and processes which seek to prevent the facilitation of fraud on their respective platforms,"
Mark Tierney, CEO of Stop Scams UK, said projects such as FIRE can lead to "wider data sharing," which would help with reporting and successfully tackling scams.
"We're delighted to see some of our member banks join Meta's FIRE initiative in another positive example of cross-sector collaboration," Tierney said. "We believe FIRE could become a game changer 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."
