Facebook owner Meta shares data with UK banks to forestall fraud

Facebook parent company Meta announced on Wednesday that it was working with two leading banks within the United Kingdom on an information sharing agreement to guard consumers from fraud.

Meta announced that it’s expanding its Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIPE) to permit UK banks to share information directly with the social media giant to assist it detect and eliminate fraudulent accounts and coordinated fraud schemes.

Meta said the technology has already been tested with several lenders within the UK. In one example, Meta said it was capable of suspend 20,000 accounts of fraudsters involved in a concert ticket fraud network targeting people within the UK and US due to shared data from British lenders NatWest and Metro Bank.

NatWest and Metro Bank are the one UK banks currently a part of the fraud information sharing pact, but Meta says more might be joining later.

“As part of this work, we have already taken action against thousands of accounts run by fraudsters, which shows how important it is that banks and platforms work together to address this societal problem,” Nathaniel Gleicher, global head of fraud at Meta, said on Wednesday in an announcement.

“We will 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 combat further fraud worldwide,” Gleicher added.

Meta has long faced calls from banks within the UK to do more to stop fraudsters from running rampant on its platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

In 2022, British digital bank Starling, backed by Goldman Sachs, began boycotting Meta and removing promoting from its platforms over concerns that the corporate was failing to combat fraudulent financial promoting.

Meta's apps have often been abused by scammers who try to scam users out of their money through various fraudulent schemes.

One of probably the most common types of fraud users encounter on the Company's platforms is allowed push payment fraud, where criminals try to persuade people to send them money by posing as individuals or corporations selling a service .

Meta already has policies in place that prohibit the promotion of monetary fraud, resembling loan scams and schemes that promise high returns. The company also prohibits ads that promise unrealistic results or guarantee a financial return.

image credit : www.cnbc.com