British fintech giant Revolut wasted no time in calling out Meta’s newly unveiled program to tackle fraud.
A day after Facebook’s parent company announced a data-sharing agreement with British banks and financial institutions to help protect customers from becoming victims of fraud, Revolut said Meta’s initiative “falls woefully short of what’s required to tackle fraud globally.”
“These plans are baby steps, when what the industry really needs is giant leaps forward,” Revolut’s head of financial crime, Woody Malouf, said in a statement released Thursday.
Malouf argues that social media platforms enable fraud to take place, and Meta’s platforms—Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram—accounted for 62% of all scams reported to Revolut in the first half of 2024.
“These platforms share no responsibility in reimbursing victims, and so they have no incentive to do anything about it,” Malouf said. “A commitment to data sharing, albeit needed, simply isn’t good enough.”
A spokesperson for Meta said, “Fraud is a multi-sector spanning issue that can only be addressed by working collaboratively. Our pilot Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange programme (FIRE) is designed to enable banks to share information so we can work together to protect people using our respective services. We encourage banks including Revolut to join in this effort.”
A day earlier, Meta had announced that its FIRE program was being extended following the success of its six-month pilot. The U.S. tech giant said it was able to remove 20,000 accounts run by scammers based on intelligence provided by NatWest and Metro Bank.
But Revolut wants Meta to commit to share with banks the costs of reimbursing victims who had been defrauded while using its platforms. The London-based fintech says Meta’s FIRE program puts the emphasis on financial institutions to provide data on the scams they discover on Meta platforms, rather than Meta investing more to monitor its sites.
The debate between the two tech giants comes just four days before new rules come into effect which require banks and payment firms in the U.K. to reimburse victims of authorized push payment (APP) fraud with compensation of up to £85,000 ($111,500). The Payments System Regulator had earlier sought to set that cap at £415,000, but the figure was reduced after heavy lobbying from the industry.