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Sen. Grace Poe on Thursday said the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) and the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) must intensify their efforts to stop widespread text scams, which are victimizing many mobile phone users with false promises of easy work and large earnings.
“The unabated surge of text scams has brought further hardship and distress on our people who are already mired in debts. This must stop,” Poe said in a statement indicating her frustration and disgust over the racket.
“We cannot allow these scammers and the syndicates behind these text schemes to prey on our countrymen who are already slumped by the effects of the pandemic and the skyrocketing cost of fuel and other basic goods,” she said.
Poe, chair of the Senate committee on public services, cited complaints from mobile subscribers, including herself, who had received unwanted text messages offering jobs, extra income, incentives and freebies from unknown senders.
“As more rely on digital technology to cope with the hard times, so must we intensify all necessary safeguards against heightened risks that can overturn our people’s efforts at recovery,” Poe said.
She said text scams persist with new gimmicks to lure and deceive mobile phone users.
A typical scam offers a job with unbelievably high compensation. One example: “Congratulations you can work online. No experience requires (sic) P8,800 per day.”
Another says: “I am a hiring manager of Amazon (Philippine branch), hiring part-time workers who can work from home, with a daily salary of 6000P.”
Still others offer enticements that may be difficult for some people to ignore such as: “Quickly earn pesos mobile games, download the APP to get P777.”
The text messages often include an online link, which, when clicked, directs the victims to a phishing site where their personal details are stolen.
According to the DICT, phishing is a “fraudulent process used by spammers to acquire sensitive information from users such as usernames, passwords and credit card details.”
Text recipients are often deceived since the messages appear to be sent by legitimate and trustworthy sources, the DICT said.
Poe noted that these hoaxes had proliferated despite an earlier directive from the NTC ordering the country’s major telecommunications companies—Globe Telecom, Smart Telecommunications and Dito Telecom—to warn their subscribers against bogus offers.
As of the end of March 2022, Globe has 87.4 million subscribers while Smart has 70.3 million, according to the companies’ disclosures to the Philippine Stock Exchange. Dito’s 2021 annual report said it had 5 million subscribers.
Appeal to telcos
Poe urged the telcos to beef up their efforts to block subscriber identification modules (SIM) cards that had been confirmed to have been used in criminal activities.
She expressed confidence that the SIM card registration bill, which she authored but was stuck down by Malacañang, would be approved by the 19th Congress.
Poe called on her colleagues in the incoming Congress to take up the SIM card registration bill to “help institutionalize protection” for millions of mobile phone users in the country.
“The whole of government must ensconce a safer and more secure digital and mobile phone use in the country to protect our people from falling deeper into poverty and helplessness,” she said.
“To most, the mobile phone is their only means to survive, and it shouldn’t at all be compromised,” Poe said.
The senator did not say how many Filipinos had fallen prey to these scams and how the scammers might have acquired the mobile phone numbers they had targeted.
This type of text scam was observed to have started late last year. Many mobile phone users have since received almost daily suspicious job offers.
16M victims in 2019
According to the DICT website, 15.9 Filipinos reported having fallen victim to various text scams in 2019.
Of this number, about 1.2 million said they were victims of hacking and about 217,000 were phishing victims.
Central Luzon reported the highest number of cases of text scams with 3.4 million victims, followed by Western Visayas and the National Capital Region with about 2.8 million cases each, according to the DICT 2019 report.
Last week, incoming Information and Communications Secretary Ivan John Uy, said the country’s law enforcers would have to undergo more training to deal with the problem of text and online scams.
“We need to build up a better digital police or a digital NBI (National Bureau of Investigation) that can go after these cybercriminals,” he said.
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