The governments of ten nations have called on social media operators to improve their ability to detect and prevent fraud from flourishing on their platforms.
The call came in a communiqué issued in the wake of the Global Fraud Summit – a meeting attended by reps from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States – which wrapped on Monday .
The communiqué is a broadly phrased document, as is typical of the output from international gabfests. But it does get specific in its assertion that “Fraudsters operate at scale, exploiting telecommunications networks, cyberspace and a population that spends an increasing amount of time online.”
Attendees therefore suggested a four-pronged approach to addressing fraud:
- Building international understanding, partnerships and capabilities;
- Better empowering the public, including by making it easier to recover money lost to scams;
- Pursuing organized fraudsters acting transnationally, including by data-sharing among law enforcement agencies;
- Preventing the reach and means of fraudsters, with special emphasis on having tech companies, telcos and financial institutions do more to stop crims using their platforms.
Telcos are already under fire for often losing the never-ending game of whac-a-mole with scam callers, while banks are being pressured to offer better responses when their customers inadvertently send money to crims.
But after the summit, Australia’s assistant treasurer Stephen Jones told waiting media that social media platforms in particular need to clean up their acts. He named “Meta in particular” – adding “You’re not above the law.”
There’s a double entendre there. Australia this week released its latest scam data and – while incidents dropped pleasingly – Jones said Meta platforms carry 80 percent of scams detected down under.
Australia is also beefing with Meta over its decision to back away from a past commitment to pay news organizations for the right to link to their work.
That’s a fight for the future. For now, Jones brushed aside suggestions that stopping fraud is hard for Meta to do.
“These guys are the biggest technologists in the world. They employ the best information technologists, the best engineers, the best process experts in the world. They are the biggest and the best,” the minister argued. “Don’t tell me they can’t do more.”
Those words came a day before Meta showed off how much more it can do. In a post by members of its engineering team, the social network kraken trumpeted the imminent debut of two AI training clusters packing 24,000 GPUs apiece. They’re part of an infrastructure dedicated to AI that will soon have 350,000 Nvidia H100 accelerators in service – and computing power equivalent to 600,000 of those GPUs – all to be used for generative AI.
Minister Jones may have a point. ®
