Connecting the Dots: Why Anti-Scam Centres Must Work Together Across Borders
By Dr. Kimmo Soramäki (Founder & CEO)
In recent years, we’ve seen a wave of national anti-scam centres emerge. In Malaysia, the National Scam Response Center (NSRC) has brought together the central bank, law enforcement, and payment operators to respond to scams in real time. Singapore’s Anti-Scam Command, the National Anti-Scam Centre in Australia, and Hong Kong’s Anti-Deception Coordination Centre are further examples of this trend: cross-sector institutions focused on tracking, freezing, and recovering stolen funds. In Indonesia, plans for a national fraud portal are progressing, and the same trend is visible in the Middle East. These are the early building blocks of a global infrastructure for scam response.
But this infrastructure is incomplete, and a critical vulnerability remains. When fraudulent payments cross borders, the trail often goes cold. Criminals understand this. Cross-border payments are routinely used to move scam proceeds beyond the reach of domestic investigators. In this context, national solutions are no longer sufficient. To stop fraud, we must connect the dots between countries.
At the Johannesburg FFIS-BASA roundtable, I proposed three foundational elements to make this possible: technology, clearing houses, and leadership.
Technology to Keep Up With the Scale and Speed
Let me start with a success story from Malaysia. When the National Scam Response Center (NSRC) first launched, it relied on manual tracing and call center-based escalation. But as case volumes rose, this quickly became unsustainable. The authorities turned to automation. FNA’s Money Trails platform was deployed to provide real-time tracing of scam funds across banks. The result was a 60-fold increase in the share of funds that could be earmarked for victims, and a 75% reduction in the time it took for bank case investigators to close cases. As criminals become more advanced, we need to continue embedding AI into the entire value chain of fraud response, from incident capture and validation to prioritization, funds tracking, and recovery. We also need to stay ahead of criminals by utilizing AI-driven fraud detection, leveraging data from the entire ecosystem, not just individual banks.
This kind of capability is essential for cross-border payments too. When victims report a scam involving a foreign payment or the trail of the money mule network leads abroad, we need systems that can instantly trace funds across jurisdictions and identify suspect accounts in seconds, not days. Real-time track-and-trace is the backbone of modern scam response.
Clearing Houses for Scam Intelligence
Now imagine a future with 200 anti-scam centres, one in every jurisdiction. If each one tried to connect directly to the others, we’d have nearly 20,000 bilateral links to maintain. This is not sustainable. Instead, we need regional clearing houses as hubs that facilitate the secure exchange of fraud intelligence between national systems.
Who could take on this role? Regional payment systems are natural candidates. Platforms such as COMESA in East Africa, Nexus in Southeast Asia, and Buna in the Arab region are already building infrastructure for fast, cross-border payments. These entities have the legal, technical, and operational capacity to host shared intelligence exchanges, allowing national centres to connect once, not hundreds of times.
Leadership to Align Mandates and Mobilise Action
Finally, none of this will happen without leadership. Technology and governance models exist, but institutions need support to prioritise and implement them. Here, the G20 has shown what is possible. Its Cross-Border Payments Roadmap has catalysed serious reform, including in private-public partnerships and shared utilities. Fraud and scams must now be integrated into this agenda as a core pillar of trust in financial systems.
If we don’t act, we risk undermining years of progress in financial inclusion and digital transformation. Victims of scams are often those who only recently joined the formal financial system. If they lose faith, the retreat could be swift and damaging.
We must move from isolated responses to coordinated infrastructure. A global anti-scam network driven by national centres, connected via regional hubs, and governed by multilateral cooperation and standards is within reach.
