One of Australia’s largest banks, Westpac, has accused Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta of failing to adequately deal with fake posts on its platforms that are in turn resulting in its customers being targeted by fraudsters.

Westpac customer and corporate services group executive Carolyn McCann wrote to Meta earlier this month confirming that 360 scam incidents were recorded by the bank since October last year, reported The Australian.

Westpac was alerted to at least 320 customers who claimed that they had been scammed through Meta’s Facebook Marketplace platform.

Additionally, another 40 Westpac customers reported they were scammed through house or car rental ads placed on Facebook.

Several customers reported losing thousands of dollars in these scams. One customer even lost as much as $80,000 on a crypto scam advertised on Facebook.

McCann urged Meta representative “to review the way the Facebook platform is being used to scam ordinary Australians”.

Meta has made some changes as it attempts to control scams perpetuated using its platforms. It announced in June that it would require advertisers to provide verified phone numbers before posting ads.

But financial institutions aren’t relying on companies such as Meta to bring in the required change are taking steps to safeguard customers.

According to the Australian Banking Association, there were 301,778 scams worth A$477 million reported to ACCC’s Scamwatch in the 12 months to December 2023 – an average of 25,148 scams a month, worth A$39.7 million each month.

In July, Westpac and Optus introduced a new in-app calling capability for Westpac customers. Westpac SafeCall allows customers to receive calls via the app, verified by Optus and show a reason for the call. This will likely add “legitimacy” of the call, claim Westpac, helping reduce bank impersonation scams.

Also this year, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) became the first bank to integrate and share information into a new anti-scam intelligence loop (intel loop). Co-designed by the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX) and National Anti-Scam Centre (NASC), the intel loop means banks, telecommunications networks, internet service providers and social media companies can share information on scams between themselves easily.

They can share verified information with other participants in the intel loop, so that phone numbers and URLs used by scammers for calls and SMSs can be blocked, and fake websites, social media advertisements and posts taken down.

Meanwhile, National Australia Bank, one of the Big 4 banks in the country, is even monitoring the angle at which customers hold their phones when conducting banking transactions. The lender has deliberately added more “friction” to payment processing as well.

“We’ve added tooling that looks at biometrics and the way you actually interact with your devices and how you think about keystrokes,” chief executive officer Andrew Irvine said recently. “If these things are different to how you’ve used your phone in the past, our intelligence will kick in.”