Australian Banks and Meta Team Up to Combat Facebook Celebrity Scams
The social media giant has removed more than 8,000 ‘celebrity bait’ scams following reports from the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange.
Meta’s new fraud reporting tool has removed more than 8,000 fraudulent celebrity ads from its Facebook social media platform.
Working with Australian banks, Meta’s Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange has tackled scams, which commonly use images of high-profile Australian celebrities to push their fraudulent claims.
Popular figures included television presenters David Koch and Larry Emdur and singer Guy Sebastian, whose images are used either to “promote” cryptocurrency scams or, in some cases, to show the celebrity being escorted with handcuffs.
Meta has officially launched the FIRE tool with its local partner, the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX). FIRE is a direct reporting exchange between financial providers and Meta for reporting scams, with seven banks involved in the program: ANZ, Bendigo Bank, CBA, HSBC, Macquarie, NAB and Westpac.
Meta said it had received 102 reports from AFCX since April.
Speaking to reporters earlier this week, David Agranovich, Meta’s director of global threat disruption, said FIRE would help Meta connect fraudulent activity on Facebook and Instagram.
“This channel allows financial institutions to provide information and intelligence that we, as a platform, cannot and often do not see from the fraudulent activities that might be occurring on these financial institutions’ services” , Agranovich said.
“What we found is that there are a lot of things that need to be removed in an automated way, either through our large-scale detection or through our investigators looking for things that have passed that detection, but there are still things that are successful.
“And sharing signals from partners like AFCX and banks or users who see things on the platform can help us understand why and where these automated detection systems are failing.”
According to ScamWatch, Australians have already reported more than 181,000 scams in 2024, with total reported losses exceeding $186 million.
