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A new report compiled from the data of financial institutions in the Asia-Pacific region has revealed that scams are the key driver of fraud claims.
However, while some things stand true across the entire region, there’s also a wide degree of variation.
The report — compiled by biometrics firm BioCatch, and using data from organisations such as National Australia Bank and American Express — reveals that while mobile malware and social engineering scams are rife in Australia and New Zealand, it’s friend impersonation and job scams in Singapore.
But one of the key drivers of growth in scams is what the report identifies as call centre gangs — organised groups of scammers operating together and targeting a wide variety of media.
These groups tend to operate out of Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Cambodia, targeting individuals in other countries to take advantage of “jurisdictional complexities” to stay out of the reach of law enforcement. From their apparent safety, the gangs engage in a range of scam activities, from tech support scams to romance fraud, and more in between — basically, anything you can do remotely via phone or social media.
What’s worse is that many of the gangs take advantage of human trafficking to staff their “centres”. They promise honest work to their victims, then effectively hold them hostage.
In fact, human traffickers are apparently moving away from sex trafficking to using their victims to staff these so-called call centres, and — according to Interpol — it’s a tactic that’s moving from a south-east Asian phenomenon to one of global significance.
One of the scams these groups specialise in is investment scams that require a degree of remote access on the victim’s device. The scammer (who could well be a victim themselves) assists the victim in setting up an account and then walks them through a series of ever larger “investments” while promising even larger returns.
“Typically, payments start small to establish the payee as a ‘trusted existing payee’, and then the payment amounts increase over time,” BioCatch’s report said. “This scam tricks victims into believing they are making large returns on what they’ve already invested, which is, of course, false.”
The installation of remote access Trojans is a common theme, too, with RATs often found installed on a victim’s device well before the final fraud event. It’s believed that this indicates a far longer “attack period” on behalf of the scammers.
“Here, victims are being socially engineered by scammers who are using RAT to guide/coerce them,” the report concluded.
If you feel you have been a victim of a scam, you can report it to www.scamwatch.gov.au.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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