Some of the biggest names in social media, dating apps, and digital finance are teaming up to fight escalating online financial scams. Perhaps those disturbing AI-generated Facebook posts will finally meet their match.
Announced Tuesday, May 21, the Tech Against Scams coalition will act as a convening body between a network of tech companies to “collaborate on ways to take action against the tools used by scammers, educate and protect consumers, and disrupt rapidly evolving financial scams.” Members include Meta, Match Group (Hinge, Tinder), Coinbase, Kraken, Ripple, and Gemini. They are joined by the Global Anti-Scam Organization.
The group hopes to co-mingle their resources and in-house anti-scam efforts to create a more effective scam detection and prevention process across what they call the “life” of a scam. It’s an expansion of work started last year — a collaboration between Meta, Coinbase, and Matchgroup — to detect “pig butchering” crypto scams, which harness dating apps and social media platforms to find victims for fake foreign exchange or crypto trading platforms.
“Scammers and the organized criminal groups behind pig butchering schemes target people across many internet services, making it hard for any one company to see the full picture of malicious activity and counting on each of us working in silos,” wrote Chief Information Security Officer at Meta, Guy Rosen. “We hope that this coalition will serve as a force multiplier for security teams at tech companies to share threat insights and trends to enable more impactful disruptions of scam networks around the world.”
The cross-industry collaboration is significant as more consumers report growingly complex financial scams, often using advancing deepfake technology.
A February 2024 assessment by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found that Americans lost more than $10 billion to fraud last year — the highest number reported by the FTC yet. Consumers reported losing more than $4.6 billion to investment scams, predominately via online bank transfers and cryptocurrency scams. Imposter scams were still the number one method used by scammers to target individuals.
As FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection director Samuel Levine wrote in the report’s release, “Digital tools are making it easier than ever to target hard-working Americans.”
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