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UK Finance and the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA) have launched Scam Signal, a joint solution that brings together leading UK mobile operators and banks.
Designed to tackle the rising rates of authorised push payment (APP) fraud, the initiative combines network data with banking insights to help spot and stop scams in real time.
It comes after complaints from the banking and payments industries that they end up shouldering the harms from APP fraud, despite cases often stemming from elsewhere in the payments ecosystem, such as social media and telecommunications.
“Working with GSMA has been invaluable in making UK mobile network operators available to support and analyse data with our financial services members,” said Dianne Doodnath, principal of economic crime at UK Finance.
“This collaboration has resulted in a strong solution that should have a real impact by identifying criminal activity and increasing fraud detection.”
Participating mobile operators, including EE, Virgin Media O2, Three and Vodafone, are joining forces with UK Finance members such as NatWest to make this cross-industry effort possible.
The collaboration takes an API-driven approach, enabling banks to analyse network data to identify patterns that may indicate fraud, such as suspicious call behaviour linked to fraudulent bank transfers.
Tackling phone scams
APP fraud resulted in losses of £213.7m in the first half of 2024 alone, and 35 percent of these frauds began with phone scams, highlighting the importance of involving telecommunications data in detecting fraudulent activity.
Through a series of joint workshops, UK mobile network operators and banks analysed real-time mobile data to identify specific correlations between fraudulent phone activity and APP fraud.
Vodafone’s pilot project on Scam Signal demonstrated its effectiveness, achieving a 30 percent increase in scam detection for a major UK bank.
“It is great to see the result of our members’ collaboration directly addressing that problem and providing significant benefit to the UK public,” said Brian Gorman, fintech lead at GSMA. “Scam Signal is already detecting fraudulent calls and stopping transactions to criminals.”
“Delivering this solution was made possible by the close collaboration between our members and UK Finance and its members; and we are looking forward to continuing our valuable work together.”
UK Finance and GSMA hope that Scam Signal will become a valuable tool in protecting consumers from financial fraud, helping to safeguard UK banking customers against the sophisticated tactics used by fraudsters.
Given moves in the EU and Singapore to make telecommunications and social media networks more accountable for fraudulent activity that is able to take place on their systems, the cross-sector collaboration may also help to spare the UK mobile industry increased regulatory oversight.
