Google Joins Forces with GASA and DNS RF to Tackle Online Scams at Scale

Google on Wednesday announced a new partnership with the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) and DNS Research Federation (DNS RF) to combat online scams.

The initiative, which has been codenamed the Global Signal Exchange (GSE), is designed to create real-time insights into scams, fraud, and other forms of cybercrime pooling together threat signals from different data sources in order to create more visibility into the facilitators of cybercrime.

"By joining forces and establishing a centralized platform, GSE aims to improve the exchange of abuse signals, enabling faster identification and disruption of fraudulent activities across various sectors, platforms and services," Google said in a blog post shared with The Hacker News.

"The goal is to create a user-friendly, efficient solution that operates at an internet-scale, and is accessible to qualifying organizations, with GASA and the DNS Research Federation managing access."

The tech giant said it has shared over 100,000 URLs of bad merchants and more than 1 million scam signals to be fed into the data platform, and that it intends to provide data from other products.

"We know from experience that fighting scams and the criminal organizations behind them requires strong collaboration among industry, businesses, civil society and governments to combat bad actors and protect users," it added.

Google further took the opportunity to note that Cross-Account Protection has been used to protect 3.2 billion users across sites and apps where they sign in with their Google Account. As a next step, the company said it's partnering with Canva, Electronic Arts, Indeed, and Microsoft-owned LinkedIn.

The development comes a week after Meta said that it's teaming up with U.K. banks to combat scams on its platforms as part of an information-sharing partnership program dubbed Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIRE).