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Cifas joins global fraud-sharing network in crackdown

Cifas joins global fraud-sharing network in crackdown

Wed, 15th Jul 2026 (Today)
Mark Tarre
MARK TARRE News Chief

Cifas has joined the Global Signal Exchange, connecting nearly 800 member organisations to the fraud-sharing network.

The partnership links Cifas members across banking, retail, insurance and telecoms with technology companies, financial institutions, infrastructure providers and law enforcement agencies.

It allows members to share scam indicators such as suspicious URLs, domains and IP addresses across borders, while drawing on intelligence from other participants in the network.

At the centre of the partnership is Scamlink, Cifas' repository of scam signals collected from members and used to detect and disrupt scams. Cifas has already sent an initial batch of signals into the Global Signal Exchange, adding almost 500 on the first day of operation.

The exchange, run by Oxford Information Labs, acts as a clearing house for threat signals linked to scams, fraud and other cybercrime. The organisations say the platform has processed more than 1.3 billion data points used to map activity including phishing, malware and spam.

Cross-border sharing

The deal reflects a broader push by fraud prevention groups and technology companies to share operational data more widely as scams increasingly cross jurisdictions and platforms. The organisations involved argue that individual firms often see only fragments of a scam operation, while pooled signals can reveal shared infrastructure and patterns.

UK consumers lose almost GBP £10 billion a year to scams, according to Cifas, while the global economic cost is estimated at more than GBP £433 billion. Those figures help explain why cross-border intelligence sharing has become a growing focus for anti-fraud groups.

Cifas members will be able to contribute signals that could support the takedown of malicious content outside the UK. In return, they will gain access to scam intelligence generated elsewhere in the network that may help identify risks affecting their own customers and systems.

Mike Haley, chief executive officer of Cifas, set out the rationale for the move.

"Scams are a global threat and tackling them demands coordinated action across sectors and borders. Through the GSE 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. Connecting into a global network of technology platforms and infrastructure providers ensures our members can take faster, 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," Haley said.

Network effect

The Global Signal Exchange has positioned itself as a shared system for organisations that each hold part of the fraud picture. By combining reports from online platforms, banks, telecoms providers, infrastructure companies and public bodies, it aims to spot links between scam campaigns and the systems that support them.

The model has gained attention as regulators, banks and online services face pressure to respond more quickly to fraudulent content and payment scams. A common challenge has been fragmented reporting, with useful indicators often held in separate corporate or national silos.

Emily Taylor, chief executive officer of Oxford Information Labs and co-founder of the Global Signal Exchange, said the value of the network rises with each new contributor.

"Scams don't respect borders, and neither can our response. Cifas brings deep, specialist intelligence from nearly 800 UK organisations, and connecting that into the Global Signal Exchange means those signals can now drive takedowns anywhere in the world, in real time. Every partner who joins makes the whole network sharper. That is the point of a shared clearing house: the more the ecosystem contributes, the harder it becomes for the facilitators of fraud to hide," Taylor said.

Cifas describes itself as a not-for-profit fraud prevention service. It says its tools and services helped businesses prevent more than GBP £2.4 billion in fraud losses in 2025. Its membership base gives the exchange a larger stream of UK market intelligence, particularly from sectors frequently targeted for impersonation, account takeover and payment fraud.

The addition of Cifas also expands the UK presence within the Global Signal Exchange, which is building an international pool of fraud indicators that can be acted on quickly by organisations able to remove, block or investigate malicious infrastructure.

On its first day in the network, Cifas contributed almost 500 new signals.