Craig Newmark on Why Sharing Threat Signals Is the Future of Scam Prevention
This month we had Craig Newmark on the podcast. If the name doesn't ring a bell straight away, he's the guy who founded Craigslist, and these days he spends most of his time and money on philanthropy. He joined Lucien and Emily for an episode of Cyber Everything, recorded in San Francisco, and the conversation ended up covering a lot of ground, from why he gives money away in the first place, to the Global Signal Exchange, to what actually needs to happen if we're going to get ahead of online fraud.
From Customer Service to Philanthropy
Here's a fact that stuck with us: Newmark built one of the biggest websites on the internet, and then spent years personally answering its customer service emails himself. Not delegating it. Actually replying to people, one by one.
Two things seem to have shaped where he puts his time and money now. There was a civics class he took back in 1970 that left him convinced a trustworthy press is "the immune system of democracy." And then there's all those years in the Craigslist inbox, seeing up close how easily scammers get into user-generated platforms and exploit them. It's an unusual mix, big-picture conviction and hands-on experience, and you can tell it's shaped how he does philanthropy. He doesn't just write cheques and walk away. He looks for people who are already good at the work and backs them.
The Numbers Behind the Urgency
At one point Emily put two numbers to him: fraud and scams make up around 40% of crime in the UK, but only about 1% of policing resources go towards tackling it. Newmark didn't really wade into how police should allocate their budgets, that's not his area. What he did say is where he thinks the real opportunity is, and it's not enforcement after the fact. It's catching scams before they even reach someone.
Why Signal Sharing Matters
This is where GSE came up, and honestly it felt like the part of the conversation he cared about most. He traced it back to Craigslist again: once his team started sharing patterns of bad behaviour with each other, they got noticeably better at spotting it. A global signal exchange is really just that idea, scaled up to an entire industry. Misspelled domains, dodgy IP ranges, the kind of language scammers use to create urgency, none of that is much use sitting in one company's database. Shared quickly across organisations, though, it lets domain providers, ISPs, and phone software block a threat before it ever lands in someone's inbox.
He was upfront about why more sharing doesn't happen already. Sometimes it's competitive, organisations don't want to give up what feels like an edge. Sometimes it's genuine worry about defamation, or about mishandling personal data. His answer isn't more regulation, it's a safe harbour, essentially a way for organisations to share in good faith without exposing themselves to legal risk for doing so. Get that right, he said, and signal sharing stops being a nice idea on paper and starts actually working at scale. Which is more or less the gap GSE exists to close.
Take 9: Slowing Down the Scam
He also talked us through Take 9, a project built around a simple idea: when someone you don't know gets in touch and something feels a bit off, just pause. Nine seconds or so. Long enough to check, search, or just walk away, and short enough that it doesn't feel like a big ask. It's a small thing, but it cuts right through the false urgency scammers rely on.
Looking Ahead
We asked where he'd like things to be in two or three years. His answer: get threat intelligence out of the hands of the people fighting scams and into the phones, apps, and cloud services everyone already uses day to day. Push the cost of running a scam up high enough, and scammers will eventually go and do something else with their time.
And for his Tech Room 101 pick, he didn't name a specific app or gadget. He went for large language models in general, saying they need to get better at steering themselves away from being used for scams, fraud, and misinformation. "That's very easy to say, very hard to practise."
Cyber Everything is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other major podcast platforms.
