Meta and NatWest are expanding a first-of-its-kind information sharing partnership to help protect people against fraud. The Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIRE) is a threat intelligence sharing programme for financial institutions, allowing banks to share intelligence with Meta directly so Meta can use it to stop scammers and protect users. NatWest is one of the first banks in the UK to participate in this pilot, with more scheduled to join.
“This work has already seen us take action against thousands of accounts run by scammers, indicating the importance of banks and platforms working together to tackle this societal issue,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, Global Head of Counter-Fraud at Meta. “We will only beat 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 take action against more scams globally.”
The expansion of the pilot has been welcomed by many in the banking industry, as well as by the City of London Police and the National Economic Crime Centre, amongst others.
Key successes from the initial pilot include the takedown of a significant concert ticket scam network attempting to target people in the UK and US. Thanks to data shared between NatWest, Meta and others during the six month pilot, facilitated under the cross-collaborative umbrella of Stop Scams UK, Meta was able to remove approximately 20,000 accounts run by scammers from the 185 URLs shared, which in turn has helped the company to strengthen its fraud detection capabilities.
Feedback following the initial pilot stage has been positive and Meta will now onboard more banks over the coming months as we continue to test and learn.
