There’s no escaping online scams nowadays. It is prevalent, and no matter what we and the government do, cybercriminals will not cease to exist (unless the internet stops working one day).
SoyaCincau reported that Kaspersky, the Russian cybersecurity and anti-virus company, has released a report about online scams in Southeast Asia (SEA) in the first half (H1) of 2022. The company stated that they managed to block almost 2 million financial-related phishing emails and websites..
In the H1 of 2022, Malaysia recorded a total of 27,458 bank-related phishing. We took the second spot here as Vietnam recorded a total of 56,392 cases.
For the payment system, once again, we took the second spot with 195,032 cases. The Philippines took the first spot with 238,111 cases.
When it comes to e-commerce related phishing, Malaysia ranked fourth with a total of 91,895 cases. Indonesia ranked the highest here with 169,326 cases.
Kaspersky said that the data collected are:
Anonymised data based on the triggering of the deterministic component in the Kaspersky’s Anti-Phishing system on user computers.
Kaspersky
The cybersecurity company claims that it can identify phishing pages that a user has attempted to visit by clicking on a link in an email or on the internet.
Malaysia took the number two spot in two categories, this means we are more susceptible to phishing than other SEA countries in the report.
The police said that online scam cases are on the rise and between January to July this year, there were 12,092 cases with total losses of RM414.8 million.
Also, back in September 2022, Bank Negara Malaysia also urged banking institutions to switch from the one-time password (OTP) system to more secure forms of authentication for online transactions.
Just a few days ago, BNM together with the banking industry, launched a National Scam Awareness Campaign to combat and educate the public on scams.
The best we can do is to be aware, get some knowledge, and educate the people around us. Don’t click on anything if you don’t know what it is.