When Google's vice president of trust and safety stood up at the United Nations Global Fraud Summit in Vienna on Sunday to announce a new industry accord, the core of the pitch was unusually candid: scammers are coordinating better than the platforms trying to stop them.

The Industry Accord Against Online Scams and Fraud, signed by 11 companies including Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Adobe, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Match Group, Levi Strauss, and Target, commits the group to sharing threat intelligence and coordinating defences against a threat that all of them face but none can effectively address alone. 

The practical mechanism at the heart of the initiative is Google's Global Signal Exchange, a data-sharing infrastructure that the search giant has been building to aggregate signals about scam behaviour, fraudulent URLs, impersonation patterns, AI-generated synthetic media, across platforms.

Under the accord, participating companies will feed into and draw from that exchange, giving each a view of threat actors that no single platform could construct from its own data alone.

The accord also commits signatories to deploy AI-driven detection tools for specific scam vectors that have proved particularly damaging: celebrity impersonation fraud, investment scams disguised as legitimate financial services, and deceptive links designed to mimic banking portals. Google.org has provided $15M in funding to support the initiative, according to the company's announcement.

The involvement of a non-technology company, Levi Strauss, alongside retailers like Target reflects the breadth of the impersonation problem. Brands whose names and imagery are routinely hijacked by scammers have a direct interest in cross-platform intelligence about how their identities are being weaponised, even if their own platforms are not the primary vectors.

Whether the accord translates into meaningful operational change depends on how quickly the Global Signal Exchange achieves the data volume and quality needed to surface actionable signals, and on how consistently signatories share intelligence on their own threat exposure, a disclosure that carries reputational sensitivity for all of them.

Notably absent from the signatory list are Apple and TikTok, two platforms that carry significant scam traffic through their respective app stores and short-video feeds.