Cifas Joins Global Signal Exchange to Help UK Telecoms Providers Tackle Scams

The UK’s fraud prevention service, Cifas, which is home to over 775 members including major telecoms providers such as Virgin Media and O2 (VMO2), BT, Sky Broadband and more, has joined the Global Signal Exchange (GSE) to “strengthen the global fight against” online scams by collaborating to identify, disrupt, and prevent online scams at scale across borders and sectors.

The UK telco industry’s involvement is vital to help reduce scams because, with their help, Cifas members can share scam signals (such as suspicious URLs, domains and internet [IP] addresses) to shut down malicious online content even quicker, and on an international scale.

According to the announcement, online scams were estimated to cost the global economy $579.4bn (over £433bn) in 2025 or almost £10bn in the UK, which is a figure that only seems to increase with each passing year. The new partnership will address this by allowing Cifas to connect its UK network of organisations – spanning industries including banking, retail, insurance, and telecoms – with a rapidly growing global ecosystem of technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Meta, financial institutions, infrastructure providers, and law enforcement etc.

At the heart of this effort is a system called 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 GSE, which delivered almost 500 new signals on the first day of operation to enhance the platform’s global intelligence and shut down 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 then combined with over 1.3bn data points already processed by the GSE’s advanced analytics engine, which provides a real-time, global view of significant scam activity such as phishing, malware, and spam content.

Mike Haley, CEO of Cifas, said:

“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.”

Emily Taylor, CEO of Oxford Information Labs and Co-Founder of the GSE, said:

“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.”

Clearly, it’s the scale involved that helps to make GSE such a useful tool and Cifas are now playing an important role in that.