Phone, text scam attempts fall 36.97% year-on-year in Taiwan

Taipei, Feb. 24 (CNA) Taiwan recorded about 25 million scam calls and text messages last year, a 36.97 percent drop from a year earlier and the steepest decline among Asian countries, according to a Taiwanese tech company on Tuesday.

Gogolook Co., which created caller identification app Whoscall, said in its annual fraud report that the decline shows the Taiwanese government's anti-fraud policies and cooperation with businesses have produced results.

Loan scams accounted for nearly 80 percent of all fraudulent text messages in Taiwan last year, making them the largest scam category, Gogolook's report said.

Fraud rings used false claims to persuade people to click links or call back, targeting those in urgent need of money.

Scams involving the impersonation of financial institutions accounted for nearly 10 percent of fraudulent text messages, with perpetrators posing as banks to report system upgrades, abnormal accounts or restricted card functions and asking users to click links to verify their information, Gogolook said.

Because these messages are professionally formatted and use formal language, they are easily mistaken for legitimate communications and have become one of the categories of text scam that has gradually grown in recent years, it said.

Payment scams are also on the rise, with fraud rings impersonating power, water or telecom providers to send unpaid bill notices and warn of imminent service suspension in order to pressure recipients into clicking links or completing payments quickly, the company said.

Since the amounts involved are often small and the scenarios resemble routine household bills, many people follow the instructions without checking the source.

In terms of nuisance calls, financial lending ranked first among calls received by Taiwan residents, with 14.59 million identified calls, according to the report.

Most of those calls came from non-bank systems such as private financing, car loans and high-interest loans.

This type of nuisance call occurred 3.5 times more frequently than those from regular banks, indicating that this kind of marketing by non-statutory financial institutions far exceeded that of legitimate bank lending, the report said.

Product marketing ranked second among nuisance calls with 10.35 million calls, including tea sales and real estate brokerage, the report said.