Fighting Back on Mobile Scams | Global Anti-Scam Summit London 2025

Date of Event:  26–27 March 2025

Event: Global Anti-Scam Summit London 2025

In this focused workshop hosted by F-Secure and GSMA, four organisations at the forefront of scam prevention shared their latest mobile-led efforts to protect consumers.

Olli Bliss, Business Development Manager at F-Secure, introduced the session with an overview of the scam landscape and why traditional consumer security measures are no longer sufficient. He described how F-Secure is helping telcos and banks shift their defences earlier in the attack cycle—"left on the kill chain"—to stop scams before they even reach the end user. Through SDKs, AI-powered filtering, and shopping protection, F-Secure is offering embedded solutions that block scam messages and fake websites at scale.

James Harwood from Virgin Media O2 shared the story behind Daisy, an AI-powered virtual granny who ties up scam callers to educate the public. Harwood also highlighted Virgin Media O2’s Call Defense system, which labels suspicious calls. In just three months, it flagged over 150 million calls, leading to a significant drop in consumer response rates.

Brian Webb, Consumer Security Lead at BT, detailed how BT responded to the scam crisis by building a cross-channel, company-wide strategy. This includes blocking spoofed international calls, enhancing SMS protections, and partnering with UK banks and aggregators to create trusted communication channels. BT has also shared valuable threat intelligence across industries to tackle evolving scam tactics.

Richard Cockle of GSMA closed the session with a global perspective, discussing the Open Gateway initiative to create standardised telecom APIs that support fraud prevention. Already in use across multiple markets, the platform enables telcos to collaborate with banks in real-time using common signals like call verification and SIM swap detection.