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A coalition of major social media companies, crypto firms and financial institutions have come together to form Tech Against Scams, a new partnership that seeks to identify and prevent cross-platform fraud.
The coalition includes Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp; Match Group, parent company of Tinder and Hinge; and crypto firms Coinbase, Kraken, Ripple and Gemini.
It also includes the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), whose members range from big tech companies such as Amazon and Google to financial institutions including Barclays and Capital One.
Tech Against Scams will serve as a “convening body” where participating companies will collaborate on ways to disrupt the tools used by scammers and educate and protect consumers, it said in a statement.
The work will include sharing best practices, threat intelligence and other tips and information to help keep users safe before falling victim to a scam.
A key focus of the coalition will be the fight against romance scams and crypto scams, including “pig butchering” scams where victims are lured gradually into making ever larger transfers to a scammer.
Guy Rosen, chief information security officer at Meta, said each of the coalition’s members can protect their users more effectively by working together rather than in siloes.
"Scammers and the organised criminal groups behind pig butchering schemes target people across many internet services, making it hard for any one company to see the full picture of malicious activity,” he said.
"We hope that this coalition will serve as a force multiplier for security teams at tech companies to share threat insights and trends to enable more impactful disruptions of scam networks around the world."
The coalition said it will build on years of investment that members have made independently to help protect their users from scams and other security risks. It will also work closely with law enforcement on information sharing to assist in investigations.
Meta’s reputation under threat as scams multiply
Although the coalition lauded its previous investments in protecting users, it is no secret that Meta has become a global shopfront for online scam activity.
Last year, the UK banking industry identified Meta as the single largest source of online scams. In June, TSB published internal data showing that Meta-owned platforms account for 80 percent of fraud cases across the bank’s three largest fraud categories (purchase scams, investment scams and impersonation scams).
Facebook Marketplace, Meta’s peer-to-peer (P2P) e-commerce site, was particularly criticised, having been linked to an average of almost 200 purchase scam cases per day.
By the end of the year, TSB said the situation had worsened at Facebook Marketplace, prompting the bank, in January 2024, to issue an “urgent warning” to customers not to use it.
Specifically, a TSB study found that more than a third of adverts on Facebook Marketplace could be scams.
Paul Davis, director of fraud prevention at TSB, called on Meta to “face up to its responsibility” and do more to tackle scams at source.
“It has a duty of care to the millions of customers who use its platforms, which is all the more important when we see innocent people lose life-changing sums every day,” he said last year.
In the latest annual fraud report by UK Finance, published this week and covered by Vixio, scams that originate on social media, such as purchase scams and romance scams, were up significantly in terms of both total losses and total cases.
In 2023, UK consumers lost £85.9m to purchase scams, an annual increase of 28 percent, and lost £36.5m to romance scams, an increase of 17 percent.
