One third of sellers on Facebook Marketplace are 'probably fraudulent', banking bosses tell MPs – as they expr – Daily Mail

One third of sellers on Facebook Marketplace are ‘probably fraudulent’, MPs heard from banking bosses today.

Those in charge of combating fraud of customers’ accounts shared their fears about the online buying and selling platform to a House of Commons committee.

Paul Davis, financial crime prevention director at TSB, revealed how his staff recently used their own Facebook profiles to engage with 100 sellers.

‘Our assessment was that about a third of them were probably fraudulent,’ he told the Home Affairs Select Committee.

Mr Davis also revealed his own personal experience of ‘weird’ requests from potential buyers when he had posted things for sale himself.

He expressed concerns that online crooks are ‘not lone actors’ and work together ‘around the world’ to scam users.

Woody Malouf, global head of financial crime at Revolut, told MPs how his firm was investing heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help protect their customers from online fraud.

But, also appearing before the committee, Philip Milton, public policy manager for fraud at Meta – the parent company of Facebook – stressed the tech giant took the issue of fraud on the platform ‘extremely seriously’.

He said fraud ‘fundamentally undermines the experience we’re trying to provide for people’ and so Meta was ‘directly incentivised’ to do all it can to prevent scams.

The committee heard from banking bosses and tech chiefs this morning as part of its ongoing inquiry into fraud, which now accounts for over 40 per cent of all criminal offences in England and Wales.

Mr Davis told MPs how ‘about 80 per cent’ of scams that impact TSB’s customers ‘start on social media’.

‘Indeed, let’s not walk past the fact that when I say social media there, the majority of them start from the channels owned by one company in particular, which is Meta,’ he said.

‘For purchase scams, we find Facebook Marketplace is the main place where those scams originate.’

He added: ‘Facebook Marketplace doesn’t have a payments channel attached to it, it’s not like a website you might use to buy something off a high street shop, for example, or Amazon.

‘So, you have to get bank details from the seller of that item. What we see are customers telling us is that they get bank details from the seller, send them money and then the item never turns up.

‘We see this impacting all kinds of items. You name it, trainers, electrical goods, games consoles, pets, and cars, caravans, literally anything.

‘So you pay for an item, it doesn’t turn up. Another scam can impact those who are trying to sell something on Facebook Marketplace.

‘So I’ve done it myself. I’ve posted an item for sale and then almost immediately I’m bombarded by people supposedly wanting to buy it… and over time those conversations develop into all kinds of weird things, where they need me to pay for insurance or they ask me to hand the item over to a delivery driver and the cash will follow later, all kinds of things.’

Mr Davis described how his staff had undertaken their own efforts to uncover the level of fraud on Facebook Marketplace.

‘We did some work recently in my team where we used our own personal profiles on Facebook to engage with 100 sellers, 100 items, on Facebook Marketplace,’ he told the committee.

‘Our assessment was that about a third of them were probably fraudulent.’

Mr Davis also told MPs that, from speaking to fraud victims, it was ‘clear that these are not lone actors, this is organised fraud’.

‘Criminals specialise in different aspects of the organised fraud and work together, in a similar way a corporate or a company in the UK would, to steal our cash,’ he continued.

‘It’s clear they operate around the world and this is not just something that a lone individual can do in their bedroom in the UK.’

Mr Malouf told MPs that Revolut was investing ‘very heavily in machine learning, AI effectively, to protect our customers’.

‘We’ve taken a machine learning first approach, because we believe it’s much more effective at detecting these things,’ he added.

‘It also responds more quickly to emerging trends and it will also protect us against the AI that is attacking us, like, the best way to find a deepfake is with computer vision, machine learning, rather than necessarily a human, because it is designed to trick a human.’

Mr Milton told the committee that Meta had committed 20 billion dollars on ‘safety and security’ since 2016 – with five billion dollars ‘in the last year alone’.

‘We have 40,000 people working across the company on safety and security,’ he said.

‘Half of that number are involved in directly reviewing content, so we invest significantly in trying to prevent this kind of thing from happening.’

Mr Milton added that fraud ‘fundamentally undermines the experience we’re trying to provide for people’ and this, combined with fraudulent advertising impacting trust in the company from advertisers, meant the firm was ‘directly incentivised’ to do all it can to prevent criminal activity.