TikTok Joins Global Signal Exchange to Combat Online Fraud

Today it was announced that TikTok will be taking first steps to join the Global Signal Exchange (GSE) - the world’s first global infrastructure powering the fight against fraud. Commenting on this new development, Emily Taylor, CEO at the Global Signal Exchange reflects on the importance of building trust and intentional collaboration in the global fightback against online fraud and abuse. “Scammers work across platforms, sectors and countries, and the people stopping them have to do the same. That’s why TikTok is joining the Global Signal Exchange (GSE) this week in Bangkok, alongside the banks, tech platforms and government agencies that have already engaged with GSE and have experienced the seismic impacts that come from secure, well-managed data sharing. Only a few months ago, Microsoft took down RedVDS, a criminal marketplace linked to more than $66 million in reported US fraud losses, then noticed its operators moving across to Google’s infrastructure. Microsoft used the GSE to alert Google, and that led to a 97% reduction in RedVD’s footprint. Google’s intelligence also helped Microsoft to shut down a fake helpdesk fraud campaign impersonating Microsoft’s own brand. Competitors, we were told, would never work side-by-side. Yet GSE Members have come round to a different way of thinking and once organisations have seen what threat sharing can do, they want to keep doing it. This is the way forward. “Working with TikTok is important to help us all tackle online abuse because we need all the world’s major brands working together. We see it as a first step, and we’ve taken it with care. GSE is the intersection that connects brands and cultures that ordinarily might compete or have suspicion between them. Taking down the walls that separate people and brands, we give the world’s biggest organisations a trusted, compliant, secure place where they can share threat data signals. Each brand stays full in control of what it does and doesn’t want to share. Scammers do share, and for too long they have preyed on the silo culture of major brands as a weakness they can freely exploit. Through a shared culture of collaboration, we can turn the tables on them. This is why bringing TikTok into the GSE community in a controlled way starts a process whereby our shared ability to deliver significant impacts is greatly enhanced. “Scams rarely stay in one place. A fake investment ad catches someone’s eye on one app, the supposed adviser chats to them on a second, and a request to pay arrives through a third. Each step sits in a different company’s data, so the only people who see the whole journey are the scammer and the victim. Younger people spend much of their day on the biggest platforms, which is why any plan to protect them has to include those platforms as well. “Every member decides what it shares, who it shares with and what it does with what it receives. Some share with everyone, some with a few trusted peers, some with everyone bar a few. “Ask someone you’ve only just met for their PIN and they’ll pause, and the organisations we work with feel the same about their data. What they get in return for trusting in the GSE community is a view of scams that no single organisation could have alone, and the freedom to act on it in whatever way suits them. Nobody has a quota, nothing goes on the open web and nobody is told what to act on, in my experience, people given that much freedom get creative. “Our league tables are one example of that freedom at work; ranking domain registrars, registries and networks by the number of threat reports against them drives competitive change through reputational pressure. “The next stage is wider. Wealthy, highly connected countries such as Japan and Singapore are heavily targeted by scammers, and the Asia-Pacific region is also one of the most affected by scam centres, which use forced labour to industrialise global fraud. Which makes Bangkok the right place to build on this. The Japan Anti-Scam Alliance is speaking at our workshop and plenary this week, and in Australia the GSE is one of the platforms being piloted for international data sharing under the new Scam Prevention Framework. We’re also mapping the corridors scams travel along, which gives governments and regulators in different countries a way into problems they couldn’t see from one side of a border. “Looking at the UK - as an example country – more than half the population uses TikTok, including many young people. Our research found that 81% of 18 to 29 year olds said situational factors had played a role in making them more vulnerable to scams, compares with 62% overall. That is why we welcome them to the GSE today. You can’t fight online scams with one arm behind our back. Together we need to focus on what unites us and the common purpose we can share to achieve good outcomes. “I am an optimist, or I wouldn’t do this job. When I’m unsure which way to go, I put myself in the shoes of the person being scammed, and the answer usually points the same way: we need to work together, and a lot faster than we are. If you work at a bank, a platform, a telecoms company, a registrar or a regulator and want to be part of that, come and find us in Bangkok or at globalsignalexchange – and be part of the change we all need.”