Meta has announced the expansion of its threat intelligence sharing programme for financial institutions, dubbed Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIRE), with NatWest Group and Metro Bank to facilitate new data exchanges.
The Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange initiative enables banks to share intelligence with the Facebook parent company directly to help prevent scams and safeguard users.
Meta said that its expansion of the pilot has been endorsed by key players in the banking sector along with the City of London Police, the National Economic Crime Centre, and others.
NatWest Group retail banking CEO David Lindberg said: “Spotting and stopping fraudsters before they are able to target customers is the best way to address this growing problem.
“Partnering with Meta is an important step in tackling the epidemic of fraud. We welcome the opportunity to deepen our collaboration and ensure a cross-industry approach to fraud prevention and enforcement.”
According to the social technology company, the major achievements of the initial pilot include the takedown of a significant concert ticket scam network that targeted individuals in the UK and US.
During the six months pilot period, the data provided by NatWest, Metro Bank, and Meta helped in eliminating close to 20,000 accounts linked to scammers from 185 URLs shared. This was facilitated under the Stop Scams UK initiative.
The collaboration also helped Meta to improve its fraud detection capabilities. Meta also aims to onboard more banks over the coming months.
Meta counter-fraud global head Nathaniel Gleicher said: “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.
“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.” Earlier this year, NatWest Group announced its integration of OneID digital security service into the Adobe Acrobat Sign platform to enable bank-verified digital identity.
