Cifas joins Global Signal Exchange to accelerate fight against scams

In practice, the partnership will see Cifas connect its extensive UK network of nearly 800 member organisations – spanning industries including banking, retail, insurance and telecoms – with a rapidly growing global ecosystem of technology companies (among them Google, Microsoft and Meta, financial institutions, infrastructure providers and law enforcement).

The collaboration will enable Cifas members to contribute directly to the global removal of scam content across jurisdictions, while drawing on intelligence surfaced across the wider network to strengthen protections closer to home, in turn accelerating international efforts to tackle a threat that increasingly operates without borders and costs UK consumers circa £10 billion per annum.

At the heart of the partnership is Scamlink, Cifas’ centralised repository of scam signals, contributed by members and used to detect and disrupt scams. Cifas has already shared its first batch of signals with the Global Signal Exchange, enhancing the platform’s global intelligence and reinforcing collective efforts to enable the speedy shut down of malicious activity.

Each signal – which includes data such as suspicious URLs, domains and IP addresses – strengthens the wider network, improving the ability for organisations to act quickly and decisively. These signals are combined with over 1.3 billion data points already processed by the Global Signal Exchange’s advanced analytics engine, which provides a real-time and global view of significant scam activity such as phishing, malware and spam content.

It’s this scale that gives the Global Signal Exchange its edge. By merging signals from technology platforms, banks, infrastructure providers and law enforcement across borders, its analytics engine reveals the supply chains behind global scams, exposing connections no single organisation could see alone. Cifas’ data and intelligence now feed directly into that picture, strengthening the collective response for every partner in the network.

Need for co-ordinated action 

Mike Haley, CEO of Cifas, said: “Scams are a global threat and tackling them demands co-ordinated action across sectors and borders. Through the Global Signal Exchange partnership, Cifas members are helping to identify and disrupt harmful content at scale, with their critical and specialist insight contributing directly to the takedown of scams across jurisdictions.”

Haley added: “Connecting into a global network of technology platforms and infrastructure providers ensures that our members can take faster and more decisive action. This also marks an important step in Cifas continuing to bring organisations together to enable a truly collective response to stopping scams at source.”

Emily Taylor, CEO of Oxford Information Labs and co-founder of the Global Signal Exchange, said: “Scams don’t respect borders and neither can our response. Cifas brings deep and specialist intelligence from nearly 800 UK organisations. Connecting that into the Global Signal Exchange means those signals can now drive takedowns anywhere in the world in real-time.”

Taylor concluded: “Every partner who joins makes the whole network sharper. That’s the point of a shared clearing house: the more the ecosystem contributes, the harder it becomes for the facilitators of fraud to hide.”

*Further information is available online at www.cifas.org.uk