Australians could see fewer deepfake images of celebrities in handcuffs or promoting a fraudulent cryptocurrency investment on Facebook, after Meta launched a new one-stop shop for banks to share scam information that has blocked 8,000 pages and 9,000 celebrity scams in its first six months of operation.
From January to August 2024, Australians reported $43.4 million in losses from social media scams to Scamwatch, of which around $30 million was related to fake investment scams.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has faced pressure from politicians and regulators in recent years to address the plague of scams involving deepfake images of public figures such as David Koch, Gina Rinehart, Anthony Albanese, Larry Emdur , Guy Sebastian. and others that are used to promote investment scams.
The company is being sued by mining magnate Andrew Forrest over the company’s alleged failure to address scams using his image.
Meta announced on Wednesday that it had partnered with the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX) to launch the Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (Fire) which provides a dedicated scam reporting channel between Meta and the financial providers of fraud victims. scams. It allows banks to report known scams directly to Meta and also allows Meta to inform all banks involved about scams it has discovered on its platform.
Seven banks (ANZ, Bendigo Bank, CBA, HSBC, Macquarie, NAB, Westpac) are participating in the Fire programme. This is independent of AFCX Intel Loop Information Exchange Service involving those banks, along with Optus, Pivotel, Telstra and TPG, and the National Anti-Scam Centre.
Since launching a pilot in April, there have been 102 reports, resulting in Meta removing more than 9,000 fraudulent pages and 8,000 AI-generated celebrity investment scams on Facebook and Instagram.
While initial results are promising, the number of Fire reports pales in comparison to the number of losses reported to Scamwatch, with 1,600 losses reported to social media scams in August alone.
Globally, Meta has said that in the last quarter it removed 1.2 billion fake accounts, 99.7% of which were removed before being reported by a user.
Rhonda Lau, head of stakeholder engagement at AFCX, told reporters on Tuesday the aim of the program was to make Australia a less attractive target for fraudsters.
David Agranovich, director of global threat disruption at Meta, told reporters Tuesday that the system would allow Meta to see more fraudulent activity happening outside of its own platforms so it can connect the dots with what’s happening on Facebook and Instagram.
“This channel allows financial institutions to provide information and intelligence that we, as a platform, may not, and often do not, see, of the fraudulent activity that could be occurring on the services of those financial institutions,” he said.
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Meta provides lists of domains it has blocked to other partners and will soon give the Fire platform access to its threat exchange system, which Meta uses to detect signals associated with covert influence operations, child abuse and other criminal activity on its platforms. .
“The scammers are not going to stop their activities. “Once we have blocked them, they will look for new ways to get back, new ways to get around our defense, which is why continuous information sharing like this is so critical,” he said.
Agranovich admitted Australians would be frustrated by the difficulty of reporting scams to Meta and that was something the company aimed to improve.
“What we found is that there are a lot of things that need to be removed in an automated way, either by our scale detection or by our researchers looking for things that passed that detection, but there are still things that are managing to overcome it,” he said . saying. “And exchanging signals from partners like AFCX and from banks or from users who see things on the platform can help us figure out why and where those automated detection systems are failing.”
Both Commonwealth Bank and ANZ welcomed the collaboration in comments provided by Meta.
Last month, Australia’s deputy treasurer, Stephen Jones, published bill for a scam prevention framework that would result in codes applied to banks, telecommunications companies and social media companies to take action against scams and have adequate dispute resolution processes for scam victims. Consultation on the bill ends on October 4.
