Meta Removes 9,000 Scam Pages After Australians Lose $43M to Deepfakes

Meta, the holding company of Facebook and Instagram, is cracking down aggressively on deepfake scams that have cost Australians millions of dollars by having takedown more than 9,000 scam pages. It would be consistent with reports that show loss in Australia amounting to $43.4 million through celebrity deepfake used in facilitating fake investment schemes as a scam that took in most of the victims. These scams unmistakably feature household names, like David Koch, Gina Rinehart, and Anthony Albanese touting junk investment schemes-what has perhaps most commonly been crypto-related.

Between January and August 2024, Australians reported losing $30 million to direct fake investment scams. To tackle the increasing menace, Meta spearheaded the development of the Fire. Fire is a platform created through collaboration with the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange. It allows financial institutions and Meta to share real-time information on scams.

The Fire Tool: A Partnership with Banks to Fight Scams

Fire is working with seven of Australia’s biggest banks, for example, ANZ, Bendigo Bank, Commonwealth Bank, HSBC, Macquarie, NAB, and Westpac. In return for that service, Meta shares insights from those reports back to the platform. Since it was launched as a pilot in April 2024, Meta has taken down thousands of scam pages and blocked 8,000 AI-generated deepfake scams.

Despite all this, the number of reported scams is still largely greater than the number of pages that are taken down. In August alone, 1600 reports of scams originated from social media, states Scamwatch. However, Meta will keep developing its detection methods, such as improving the communication between the banks and their platforms, to reduce the scam activity even further.

According to Meta, the director for global threat disruption, David Agranovich, said that while removing scam pages are good step forward, “scammers keep coming and coming with new ploys,” adding that the firm is looking to upgrade scam reporting and integrate much more and better intelligence from the banks and the users to outmaneuver the scammers.

There are also efforts from the Australian government. In managing such a quick growth of scam issues, Assistant Treasure Stephen Jones proposed draft legislation specifying liability for banks, telcos, and social media firms avoiding such scams. Feedback on this draft remains open until October 4, 2024.