The winners of the Scam Fighter Awards were announced at the Global Anti-Scam Summit Europe 2026 in Lisbon, recognising outstanding initiatives helping to prevent, detect, disrupt and respond to scams.
Across five categories, the awards highlighted practical action from across the anti-scam ecosystem, including public education, cross-sector collaboration, investigation and research, policy and regulatory action, and technological solutions.
Selected through jury evaluation and audience participation at the Summit, this year’s winners demonstrate the impact, innovation and scalability needed to strengthen the global response to scams.
Scam Fighter Awards 2026 Winners
Best Awareness Campaign or Educational Program
Winner: UK Financial Conduct Authority
Runner-up: S.A.F.E. by Ayleen Charlotte
The UK Financial Conduct Authority was recognised for its Firm Checker campaign, which encourages consumers to verify financial firms before investing or borrowing.
The campaign promotes a clear protective action: checking whether a firm is authorised by the FCA and has permission to provide the relevant financial services. By focusing on a specific step consumers can take before money is at risk, the FCA helps turn scam awareness into practical behaviour that can reduce exposure to investment and financial scams.
Best Cross-Sector Collaboration
Winner: Stop Scams UK
Runner-up: Cifas
Stop Scams UK was recognised for its Blocked SIMs, which brings telecoms, banks, technology platforms, law enforcement and government oversight together to disrupt SIM-enabled scam infrastructure.
The initiative targets UK Pay-As-You-Go SIMs being used overseas to create fake accounts and receive one-time passcodes. By treating blocked SIMs as a signal for wider fraudulent activity, the programme helps different sectors act on shared intelligence and make this form of abuse harder, more expensive and less scalable for criminal networks.
Best Investigation or Research
Winner: Visa
Runner-up: Bitdefender
Visa was recognised for Visa Scam Disruption, an investigative practice focused on identifying and stopping complex scam operations as they emerge.
The approach combines network-level intelligence, proactive investigation, data analysis and collaboration with financial institutions, law enforcement and other partners. By mapping relationships between merchants, payments and supporting infrastructure, Visa Scam Disruption demonstrates how investigation at scale can expose connected criminal operations, reduce losses and weaken the systems that allow scams to operate.
Best Policy or Regulatory Initiative
Winner: Global Fraud Summit 2026
Runner-up: Cifas
The Global Fraud Summit 2026 was recognised for bringing governments, law enforcement, industry and civil society together to strengthen the international response to fraud.
Organised by UNODC and INTERPOL, the summit focused on coordinated action against a rapidly evolving transnational threat. The initiative reflects the growing recognition that scams and fraud networks cannot be addressed by one jurisdiction or sector alone. By convening public and private stakeholders at global level, the Global Fraud Summit helped push fraud higher on the policy agenda and supported stronger cooperation against organised scam networks.
Best Technological Solution
Winner: Charm Security
Runner-up: Salv
Charm Security was recognised for its Agentic AI Workforce for scams and fraud prevention and resolution.
The company’s AI agents span the full fraud lifecycle, providing capabilities across fraud investigation, customer intervention and intelligence gathering to identify emerging threats. Charm’s Agentic Workforce focuses on human-centric fraud, including the moments when victims are being manipulated, frontline teams are responding and investigators are trying to connect scattered signals. By combining fraud expertise and behavioural science, the solution supports earlier intervention, stronger triage and more actionable intelligence against scam operations.
Recognising Practical Action Against Scams
The shortlisted nominees showed the breadth of work taking place across the anti-scam community, from consumer protection and victim support to intelligence sharing, policy development, research and technology.
The Scam Fighter Awards recognise initiatives that are not only innovative, but practical, scalable and capable of supporting stronger action against scam networks across borders and sectors.
Jury
The shortlisted nominees were selected by an independent jury representing public policy, law enforcement, technology, banking, media and cybersecurity.
- Angelique Miet – European Commission
- Edvardas Sileris – Europol
- John Kirwan – TikTok
- Lynn van Meijgaard – Nederlandse Vereniging van Banken
- Nick Stapleton – BBC Studios
- Thomas Rousson – Orange
Congratulations to All Winners and Nominees
GASA congratulates all winners, nominees and participating organisations for their contribution to the fight against scams.
The Scam Fighter Awards will continue across future GASA events and regional summits, recognising organisations working on scam prevention, detection, disruption, enforcement, education, policy, research and technology.
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