Reported by Ryan Browne

Facebook parent company Meta on Wednesday said that it’s working with two leading banks in the U.K. on an information-sharing arrangement to help protect consumers from fraud.

Meta said it was expanding its Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIRE) to enable U.K. banks to directly share information with the social media giant, in a bid to help it detect and take down scamming accounts and coordinated fraud schemes.

Meta said that the tech has already been tested with multiple lenders in the U.K. In one example, Meta says it was able to take down 20,000 accounts from scammers engaged in a concert ticket scam network targeting people in the U.K. and U.S., thanks to data shared by British lenders NatWest and Metro Bank.

NatWest and Metro Bank are the only banks in the U.K. that are currently part of the fraud information-sharing pact, but more are set to join later on, according to Meta.

“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,” Nathaniel Gleicher, global head of counter-fraud at Meta, said in a statement Wednesday.

Read full report: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/10/02/facebook-owner-meta-to-share-data-with-uk-banks-to-counter-scams.html