Meta hopes to cut scams on Facebook under new partnership with Australian Financial Crimes Exchange

Meta – the company that owns Facebook has announced a new direct line between their Fraud teams and the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX) that hopes to combat the financial scams on their platform to prevent the losses being suffered by average Aussies every day.

Don’t worry, I’d never heard of the AFCX either – but the organisation’s stated goal is to “benefit the community by making financial and cyber crime more visible to those who are trying to prevent and fight it.”

Put simply, all the big-four and many major banks are members of the exchange which allows them to share information with each other in a co-ordinated way about scams that are happening, the sources of them and the methods being used by Scammers.

Of course, this is critical in allowing banks to prevent people from losing money to scammers.

The Commonwealth Bank’s head of group fraud James Roberts told EFTM that “The majority of scams originate outside the banking sector, often as fake websites, phishing SMS and social media advertisements.“

Explaining the sharing loop that happens through the AFCX, Roberts says “The anti-scam intelligence sharing loop adds another layer to Australia’s defence against the scammers and enables verified anti-scam intelligence to be shared quickly and securely between banks, big tech and telcos.

“CommBank was the first entity to integrate into the intel loop last financial year and we’ve already shared more than 1,500 entries to support other industry players in combatting scams.

And the results appear to be strong, Roberts saying “Encouragingly, we saw CommBank customer losses decrease more than 50 per cent last financial year. While we are making progress, there’s more to do across all industries.

The CommBank, and others, welcome the inclusion of Meta in this information sharing program.

“Meta has an important responsibility to counter scams that target Australians on our apps,” said David Agranovich, Policy Director, Global Threat Disruption at Meta.

“In addition to investing in our own tools and technology we are working with government and industry partners to fight this scourge. Scams often cut across multiple industries, and the AFCX have been an invaluable partner to help identify and take action against scams targeting Australians.” added Agranovich. 

Meta’s involvement started earlier this year, and has already achieved results. Since April on just 102 reports from the AFCX – Meta removed more than 9,000 spam pages, and over 8,000 AI Generated Celebrity scams across Facebook and Instagram

“This trial shows sharing and acting on trusted information can help to remove a meaningful volume of scams from social media. The AFCX is pleased to have partnered with Meta in this initiative and welcomes Meta’s continued participation in the Intel Loop.” – David Pegley, Managing Director, AFCX

It will be music to the ears of some high profile Aussies like Twiggy Forrest and Gina Rinehart. Ms Rinehart wrote to Facebook’s CEO last year complaining about the scams using her likeness. Nothing had been done, and nothing did happen.

This problem needs an industry wide solution, as the Head of Customer Protection at ANZ Shaq Johnson says “With scammers operating with more sophistication than ever before, we must work across industries to continue to take the fight to cybercriminals. We are pleased to work with Meta, the AFCX and others in our industry through the Intel Loop, so we can better share timely and actionable data to better help protect Australians and disrupt criminal networks.”

It’s yet to be seen how much of an impact this will make on total losses and number of scams Aussies are falling for, but, it helps.

What Facebook really needs is to build a community of trusted users who can report content when they see it and have it actioned. Too often when users report content it comes back as “not breaching community guidelines”.

Australians need protection, these scams are sophisticated – this AFCX program and Meta’s involvement is a great start.