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The social media giant has removed more than 8,000 “celeb bait” scams following Australian Financial Crimes Exchange reports.
Meta’s new fraud reporting tool has taken down more than 8,000 celebrity scam advertisements from its Facebook social media platform.
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 included TV presenters David Koch and Larry Emdur and singer Guy Sebastian, whose images are used to either “promote” cryptocurrency scams or, in some cases, show the celebrity being escorted away in handcuffs.
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 for the reporting of 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 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 scam activity across 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 from scam activity that might be happening on those financial institutions’ services,” Agranovich said.
“What we find is there’s a huge chunk of things to get taken down in an automated way by either our scale detection or by our investigators looking for things that got through that detection, but there are still things that are making it through.
“And signal sharing from partners like AFCX and from banks or from users who see things on the platform can help us figure out why and where are those automated detection systems failing.”
According to ScamWatch, Australians have already reported more than 181,000 scams in 2024 so far, with total reported losses exceeding $186 million.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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