Thursday, December 24, 2020

More Scams During Covid

A mobile app specialising in blocking unwanted calls, recently released its latest insights on the trend of spam calls in Malaysia. Based on their findings, spam calls from financial services increased by 95% while those from insurance companies increased by 50% in the past year.

Malaysia also saw a slight increase of 2.7% in total spam calls in 2020 compared to the previous year. The Swedish company also stated that 97% of spam calls in Malaysia were made from domestic numbers.

Based on their data, 41% of spam calls in Malaysia were made by financial services while 24% were from scammers. This was followed by insurance related spam calls which made up 15% of all calls.

The biggest decrease in spam calls occurred in March and April, which was the period in time when the Movement Control Order (MCO) was implemented. In March, the volume of spam calls dropped to just over 6 million and it dropped even further down to just over 2 million in April. This was probably due to limited access to certain equipment and technologies for both telemarketers and scammers.

This brief respite was not meant to last as spam activity increased again from the month of May and June as lockdown measures eased. Now, towards the end of 2020 it looks like it is business as usual for scammers as the numbers returned to the same levels at the beginning of the year.

The vast majority of fraudster like to prey on the elderly, children and housewives. Scammers are also known to exploit these group of people by claiming to be their loved ones or authority figures like the Inland Revenue Board (IRB) or police.

Last year Malaysia had the dubious honour of being ranked number 19 on the list but it looks like things have slightly improved as it is no longer listed among the top 20.

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