Thousands Of Facebook Scams Deleted As Australians Lose $43.4m
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has announced the expansion of a scheme that sees banks sharing information with the social media giant to help protect people against fraud.
Meta said it has taken down some 8,000 so-called "celeb bait" scam ads from Facebook and Instagram as part of a new effort with Australian banks to curb the practice.
The scams use images of famous people, often generated by artificial intelligence, to trick consumers into giving money to non-existent investment schemes.
From January to August 2024, Australians reported $43.4m in losses from scams on social media to Scamwatch, with close to $30m relating to fake investment scams.
The US social media giant said it took down the scam ads after receiving 102 reports since April from the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX), an intelligence-sharing body run by the country's main banks.
Such scams are a global problem, but Meta is under heightened pressure to tackle the issue in Australia with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's government planning to introduce an anti-scam law by the end of the year.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has faced pressure from politicians and regulators in the past few years to tackle the plague of scams featuring deepfake images of public figures such as David Koch, Gina Rinehart, Larry Emdur, Guy Sebastian and others which are used to promote investment scams.
Meta recently announced it had partnered with AFCX to launch the Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (Fire) that provides a dedicated reporting channel for scams between Meta and financial providers of the victims of the scams.
Banks to directly report known scams to Meta
Meta to inform seven banks, ANZ, Bendigo Bank, CBA, HSBC, Macquarie, NAB, Westpac, which are involved in the Fire program.
Meta provides lists of domains it has blocked to the other partners, and will soon provide the Fire platform with 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.
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