SAN FRANCISCO: Social media giant Meta has announced a worldwide anti-scam awareness campaign aimed at protecting users from fraudulent schemes during the holiday shopping season. The company, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, revealed it has taken down over two million accounts linked to scam centers in Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, the UAE, and the Philippines this year. In another example, the company said its enforcement efforts have removed 15,000 phishing URLs in Vietnam and 9,000 in Singapore this year.

Working with cybersecurity firm Graphika, Meta identified three major scam campaigns targeting holiday shoppers: fake Christmas gift box promotions, fraudulent holiday decoration sales, and counterfeit retail coupons. Working in several languages, scammers are using sophisticated tactics, including AI-generated voiceovers and fake customer testimonials to lure victims, the company added. “Scammers constantly evolve their tactics to evade detection and rarely target one single platform,” Meta said in its announcement.

This ensures that “any one company can only see a small piece of these scam campaigns,” it added. The company has partnered with Rachel Tobac, a prominent Internet safety expert and ethical hacker, to educate users about online threats. Meta has also expanded its Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIRE) program, originally launched in the UK and Australia, to include banks worldwide. The initiative facilitates information sharing about potential scam activities between financial institutions and Meta’s platforms.

Scammers change tactics

Meanwhile, criminal gangs running online scam farms in the Philippines are downsizing in a change of tactics to avoid a sweeping crackdown, officials said Tuesday. President Ferdinand Marcos in July announced a total ban by end-2024 on so-called Philippine online gaming operators (POGOs) that Manila says were being used as cover by organized crime for human trafficking, money laundering, online fraud, kidnappings and even murder.

Justice Undersecretary Felix Nicholas Ty said government raids were ongoing as scammers continue to traffic foreign and local workers, forcing them to pitch clients around the world on fake investment schemes. But they no longer operate in huge compounds or office complexes in large cities, having relocated to the provinces using less conspicuous buildings. “The MO (modus operandi) right now of these operations is to have a guerrilla-style, smaller-scale (operations) in resorts, maybe even residences,” Ty told a security forum, adding some also switched to hardware that are not “top of the line”.

“We’re seeing the evolution from big-scale operations to smaller operations,” agreed Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, who also spoke at the forum. Gatchalian said the scam farms were employing other guises, including a recently raided outfit that was masquerading as a business process outsourcing but was found to be running “scamming software”. Ty said that while there were signs “that their resources are in decline,” the scam operators “remain entrenched,” and it would be “unrealistic for us to get them all” due to limited government resources and manpower.

Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, is “ground zero for the global scamming industry”, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s deputy regional representative Benedikt Hofmann told UN News earlier this year. The Washington-based think-tank United States Institute of Peace said in a May 2024 report that these scammers target millions of victims around the world and rake in annual revenues of $64 billion. “These crime groups are coming from largely mainland China and ... they started operating in the online gambling space” before branching out into the more lucrative scamming, Jason Tower, a principal author of the study, told the Manila forum.

It estimates the industry employs half a million workers, including 15,000 in the Philippines, who were recruited mainly via social media and were then forced to work on the scams, facing torture if they fail to meet quotas. It said the largest group of scam workers were in Myanmar with 120,000. Ty said the syndicates have invested “a lot of sunk costs” in their Philippine-based operations and may want to recover some of them. “That’s why they persist in operating the way they’re operating now, even if it is in a smaller scale and perhaps less profitable manner than it was before.” — AFP