Australian banks and Meta team up to crack down on celebrity scams on Facebook
The social media giant has removed more than 8,000 “celebrity bait” scams following reports by the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange.
Meta’s new fraud reporting tool has removed more than 8,000 fraudulent celebrity ads from its social media platform Facebook.
Working with Australian banks, Meta’s Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange tackled the scams, which commonly use images of prominent Australian celebrities to push their fraudulent claims.
Popular figures include TV hosts David Koch and Larry Emdur and singer Guy Sebastian, whose images are used to “promote” cryptocurrency scams or, in some cases, show the celebrity being escorted and handcuffed.
Meta 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 to report scams, with seven banks involved in the programme: ANZ, Bendigo Bank, CBA, HSBC, Macquarie, NAB and Westpac.
Meta said it had received 102 reports from the AFCX since April.
Speaking to reporters earlier this week, David Agranovich, Meta’s director of global threat disruption, said FIRE would help Meta link fraudulent activity on both Facebook and Instagram.
“This channel allows financial institutions to provide insights and intelligence that we, as a platform, may not, and often do not, see of the fraudulent activity that could be occurring on the services of those financial institutions,” Agranovich said.
“What we found is that there are a lot of things that need to be removed in an automated way, either by our scale detection or by our researchers looking for things that passed that detection, but there are still things that are making it through.
“And exchanging signals from partners like AFCX and from banks or from users who see things on the platform can help us figure out why and where those automated detection systems are failing.”
According to ScamWatch, Australians have already reported more than 181,000 scams in 2024 so far, with total reported losses exceeding $186 million.
