Often for kicks, I open the “Spam” folder of my Email and entangle myself with what digital fraudsters are up to lately in messing up people’s lives.
I precisely did that after apprising the big news about the potential personal data breach at GCash, the popular digital payments platform of Globe Telecom Inc. and immediately searched for fake GCash emails.
Usually, for safety’s sake, I quickly delete such fakeries. But I took a conscious effort at scrutinizing a message I got last month which purportedly came from the “GCash Help Center.”
The message urgently asked me to activate my account by clicking the provided link. Helpful missive that was, innocent-sounding even.
Only it was a head-scratcher: I never applied for a GCash account nor have no intentions whatsoever of enrolling into one.
I often wonder how these people could assume I wasn’t strictly a cold-cash-paying Luddite struggling with where to place in my all too-small billfold those new-fangled unfoldable one thousand peso bills.
Anyway, since I was also often bombarded by National Telecommunication Commission (NTC) text alerts imploring me to be ever watchful with digital fraud, or in the more suitable and folksier digital “budol-budol,” I had become suspicious enough to spot dead giveaways showing fraud.
By the way, all of us really have to keep up with fraudsters’ ways. In fact, in our digital era “face-to-face fraud doesn’t really happen anymore. It’s all digital,” says Louis Smith, credit card Visa’s chief risk officer for Southeast Asia.
At any rate, in the case of those fake emails, technically known as “phishing” emails, the dead giveaways I learned were: a. the email usually has a generic greeting like “Hi”; the email says your account is on hold because of a billing problem; and the email invites you to click on a link to update your payment details by sending all your personal data.
Those raise fakery alarms since legitimate companies, even if they might communicate with you by email, won’t ever email or text you with a link to update your payment information.
So there.
Still, the growing sophistication and sheer volume of digital “budol-budol” every day catches us off-guard.
Nowadays, the risks of digital fraud are alarmingly high. In fact, Globe Telecoms, which owns GCash, reported that it has already blocked 4.07 million malicious bank-related messages in the first quarter of the year, 2.7 percent higher than the number of malicious messages from last year.
Last year, too, Globe blocked 85 million bank-related spam and scam messages, part of the record-high 3 billion scam and spam messages filtered by the giant telecom firm between January 2022 and January 2023.
In another report, TransUnion, an American credit reporting outfit, says the nation had the third-highest rate of suspected fraudulent digital transactions among all countries and regions analyzed in 2022, with as much as 8.7 percent of digital transactions suspected as fraudulent.
TransUnion also reported that from a three-month survey, 71 percent of Filipinos had been targeted by digital fraud attempts through emails, phone calls, online messaging, or texts. Eleven percent of those surveyed admitted to falling victim to fraud.
The common fraud schemes experienced by Filipinos were “phishing (fraudulent emails, social posts, websites and QR codes), “smishing” (fraudulent mobile text messages), third-party seller scams, and identity theft.
Now if all these scams make it our personal responsibility not to be duped, companies and the government also have to do all they can not to make things worse than it already is.
Companies really have to beef up their cybersecurity measures and the government can’t content themselves with launching useless probes after a digital disaster or with registering cellphone SIMs.
Where, for instance, is a government-run digital facility where the public can quickly report text or email scams?
The US, for example, has SPAM (7726), a sort of 911 where Americans can forward any “smishing” text message. Here, we’re still resorting to reporting digital fraud on social media.