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SINGAPORE: Jarvis Goh, a real estate agent, used to trick scammers who called him, pretending to fall for his tricks to stay in line, before scolding them.
When I received prerecorded robocalls, I would sometimes follow the instructions until a scammer answered the call in person.
But you’ve stopped doing that because the calls are so frequent that you think your efforts are useless and take up too much time. He just hangs up when he realizes it’s a scam call.
Goh, who has three cell phones for work and personal use, recently said that she has been receiving one or two fraudulent calls a week on all three phones.
You have also noticed that scammers are getting more sophisticated, pretending to be local agencies or organizations to hook their victims.
“Of course, it’s very inconvenient … it wastes your time and interrupts whatever you are doing,” he said, adding that he knows people who have been scammed. “It’s very frustrating and (I) feel very pissed off.”
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These robocalls can be familiar to many, with a voice recording informing recipients that they need an update or repairs to their Internet connection, or that they have a package that has been stopped.
Police said that while they do not track scams by mode of communication, some scams are generally perpetrated through calls such as the China Officials Phishing Scam, Tech Support Scam and Kidnapping Scam.
TEN INCREASE IN REPORTS OF TECHNICAL SUPPORT SCAMS
In the first six months of this year, the police received 224 reports of spoofing scams from Chinese officials compared to 121 cases in the same period in 2019.
For tech support scams, victims reported 313 cases between January and June, a 10-fold increase from 30 cases in the same period last year, according to figures from the Singapore Police.
These numbers include scams that use SMS and other modes of communication and not just phone calls.
Since most fraudulent calls are ignored, only a small proportion are likely to be reported as a crime.
A woman looking at a computer while answering a call.
According to mid-year police statistics, the total amount scammed in tech support scams increased to S $ 15 million in the first half of the year compared to S $ 340,000 in the same period in 2019. The largest amount cheated in a single case in the first six months of this year was S $ 958,000.
In an advisory last month, Singtel said that fraudulent calls impersonating the telco’s customer and technical support officers have doubled to more than 5,000 calls in the year to date compared to the same. last year’s period.
“Of these, the most common are technical support scams purporting to terminate Singtel services, which account for about 10 percent of all calls we have traced,” said a Singtel spokesperson.
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In response, it launched a scam awareness campaign on November 20 called Jaga your data to warn customers about such scams.
He said the tech support scam was a “common variant”, with the scammer posing as Singtel tech support and telling victims that their IP address had been “hacked.”
Customers are asked to download software to allow remote control of their computer to solve the problem and unknowingly hand over their one-time Internet banking passwords when prompted.
“We often give our numbers too easily and not because of data breaches, it’s easy for criminals to find our numbers easily on the Internet,” said Fernando Serto, director of technology and security strategy (Asia Pacific) at Akamai. a cybersecurity and cloud services company.
“Simply answering a bad robocall will inform the machine that there is someone on the receiving end who is a potential victim of fraudulent activity, setting you up to receive more of these phone scams in the future.”
HOW SCAMMERS WORK
Clement Lee, Senior Security Consulting Architect for APAC at Check Point Software Technologies, said he receives fraudulent calls on a daily basis.
There has been an increase in voice phishing calls in particular, targeting employees working from home to collect login credentials for corporate networks, which these scammers then monetize by selling access to other groups, he said.
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“Callers are likely to be part of an organization outsourced to making fraudulent calls and paid for the number of calls they make. Automation through ‘robocalls’ helps them get paid with less hand of work required, “he said.
“As most of these calling systems have a sunk cost, there is little or no resistance to persisting in the same approach. There is also the possibility that they will be rewarded for making those calls, regardless of the results.”
Scammers typically subscribe to VoIP service providers that allow subscriptions without a strict user verification procedure, enter a script of phone numbers to be dialed, and then make automatic calls to the phone numbers in an automated manner, Chua Bo said. Yes, Architect Solutions at HackerOne.
Malicious actors can tell the victim that something went wrong, such as that their internet connection is down or that they were hacked. They can also pretend to be an authoritative figure, such as a police officer, tax regulators, or legal officers, demanding that they take certain actions, or they can tell victims that they have won a raffle.
“People should stay alert and try to identify these telltale signs,” he said. “An authority body will not proactively call you to ask you to navigate to a website and enter your credentials, nor will it ask for your personal information,” said Mr. Chua.
HOW TO IDENTIFY SPOOF CALLS
Although most fraudulent calls originate from abroad, spoofing technology can hide the real phone number and display a local number.
Since April, local telecommunications companies have worked with the government to add a “+” prefix to incoming international calls, making it easier to identify fraudulent calls.
READ: International calls to have a plus sign prefix to combat fraudulent calls
In addition, more and more tools are available, such as third-party software, that allow users around the world to report unknown and suspicious calls, forming a database of malicious phone calls.
Police launched ScamShield last month, a mobile scam filtering app that identifies and filters scam messages by identifying keywords using artificial intelligence.
The app, which is currently only available on iOS, blocks fraudulent messages and calls from phone numbers that were used in other scam cases or reported by other users of the ScamShield app.
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In their mid-year crime statistics released in August, police said the 11.6 percent increase in the total number of reported crimes was mainly due to an increase in fraud cases.
Online scams saw a significant increase as people stayed home and transacted more online due to the COVID-19 situation.
E-commerce scams, social media phishing scams, loan scams, and banking-related phishing scams accounted for 71 percent of the top 10 types of scams reported in the first half of 2020.
Like phone scams, online crimes are particularly difficult to solve due to their borderless nature.
A significant proportion of scams are committed remotely by foreign unions that continually find new methods to exploit and prey on the vulnerabilities of potential victims, police said.
