Google, Microsoft, and Friends Are Sharing Scam Intel

Eight tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, Adobe, and Match, signed a voluntary pledge to swap information on how scammers are misusing their platforms.

The pledge covers things like fraudulent accounts, phishing links, fake profiles, and impersonations. By sharing threat intelligence in near real-time, each company can respond to issues they might have missed on their own. It's not a formal regulation, nobody is policing the group. It's more like neighbors swapping notes about a suspicious door-to-door scammer.

Each company controls its own data. They’re not dumping user info publicly or sharing private messages. It’s more about spotting scam accounts, suspicious IPs, and other warning signs. They plan to make it harder for fraudsters to jump from platform to platform unnoticed.

So?

If you’ve gotten a suspicious LinkedIn connection request or a weird Amazon message lately, this is part of why companies might flag it faster than before. Nothing changes on your end. The pledge is mostly behind the scenes, trying to make online scams a little less clever and a lot more traceable.

This is the first time such a broad cross-industry collaboration has been announced publicly. It doesn’t stop scammers outright, but at least the big wigs are talking to each other for our sake, or so it seems.