Scambuster PDF

scambuster Good day, my name is George Abraham. I'm the Managing Director of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and I've been asked to give you a presentation about the global state of scams and our non-profit organization. Our mission is really to protect consumers worldwide from online scams and we do...

scambuster Good day, my name is George Abraham. I'm the Managing Director of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and I've been asked to give you a presentation about the global state of scams and our non-profit organization. Our mission is really to protect consumers worldwide from online scams and we do that with two brands. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance is a non-profit where we bring together policymakers, law enforcement, consumer authorities and the financial sector and other organizations who are being abused by scammers or really want to protect consumers more from scams. I also run scamadvisor.com which is a limited company where people can check if a website is legit or a scam. Nowadays we have more than 7 million unique visitors and we are scanning more than 2 million new domains every month to protect consumers from scams. Very briefly about ScamAdvisor. You can type in any website you like, see if it's legit and our algorithm is nowadays also used by Google, Pinterest, nearly all the antivirus companies are using our data to protect consumers. So enough about ScamAdvisor and the Global Anti-Scam Alliance. Maybe taking one step back, what are scams? Scams are a weird type of crime. It's the only crime you can fall for and that makes it very different from other crimes where people are taking things from you without your consent and we'll get back to this later. Scams are also not black and white. I mean if somebody steals your bike it's clear that it's a crime but where does bad service stop and when does it become a scam? I mean if you look at the reviews on Apple and Asos you would think you know there are scams and I think we agree they're not. How we define a gap, how we define a scam is when there's a huge gap between the products being offered and what's actually being delivered as you can see in this picture. At the core I mean scams are fraud and it's deception to you to gain money or personal data. There are many different types of scams. I mean very honestly humanity has scammed itself for a very long time. Even the Egyptians already scammed people. It was good luck to buy a mummified cat in the past and archaeologists found more than two million mummified cats, at least sarcophagus of them. Scammers sold these sarcophagus but there was no mummy inside. It was a scam. There was paper and rubbish inside. So even then we already scammed each other. Nowadays online shopping scams are by far the most popular kind of scam where we order a product and we don't get it at all or we get something which is hardly related to the original product. The second most popular scam are investment scams and many of you will say well I would not fall for this 124 percent return on investment within 24 hours, come on. But many people especially in developing nations do not have the financial knowledge and have huge inflation percentages in their country. So they fall for these kind of scams. However in the west and in the more developing countries we also fall for financial scams. A few years ago a scammer launched the squid game token and was able to grab 3.4 million US dollars in five days before Netflix who offered the series the squid game was able to take down the website. Of course in some circumstances the scammer could have known better. I mean if you try to buy a verified Paypal account, a gun, your driver's license or want to let somebody do your master thesis, the scammer is very sure you will not go to the police and say hey I ordered my master thesis and it was never delivered. And in some cases scams are too incredible to believe to be true. But there was a Japanese lady who fell in love with what she thought was an astronaut and the astronaut asked her to pay 35,000 euros because he needed money to go back to earth and to marry her. Which is of course a very sad story. Scammers are great marketeers. They use every annual event, every crisis, every tent to scam us. If there's a typhoon you can be sure that the day after there will be fake donation websites. If there's another disaster scammers will act on it very very quickly. And scammers are vicious. They also use developments like this one where in Texas a few years ago there was new legislation making it illegal to buy abortion pills online. The scammer started setting up an online store three months before the legislation came into effect saying hey you can buy them here. And of course the scam didn't stop with the product not being delivered. It then became extortion. The victims had to pay more or their family and friends would be told about them buying abortion pills. Very vicious. So how big are online scams? We do a survey every year amongst about 50,000 people and what is interesting is people are very very confident that they are able to recognize scams. It was a big surprise for me because if you then ask a few questions later have you been scammed? Many of them say yes. So there's a discrepancy between the level of confidence we have that we can recognize scams and the actual reality. Also we see that the number of scams is increasing very rapidly. 59% of all participants at least are confronted with a scam attempt via email, whatsapp, messenger, facebook at least once per month. And that frequency is increasing rapidly. To my surprise phone and text messages are still the most used media to scam people. I actually expected that the email and whatsapp and digital messengers would be leading but that's not yet the case. However we are slowly moving towards that. Facebook and whatsapp are the most named platforms which is also logical because the biggest ones followed very closely by for example google and for example in japan amazon is very popular as a scam platform because they are very huge there. Globally 87% of our participants did experience a scam in the last 12 months. The most common scam are online shopping scams and identity theft. Often followed on the third level third rank investment and it hardly differs per country. In some countries it's first online shopping scams, in others identity theft is number one. Usually nearly all the countries followed by investment scams. If you look at how much money is being lost we estimate based on results of the 50 000 consumers that globally 1 trillion US dollars was lost in scams. It's an incredible amount and 25% of the global population has been scammed in one way or another in the last 12 months. And that number is very high because we are living in the west but if you look at the developing countries Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, Southeast Asia then you see that people are scammed there a lot more than in western Europe and in the USA and also Singapore. The main reason people are being scammed is I've been attracted to the offer but many do not see the scam coming. They did not have the knowledge to recognize the scam or they simply did not identify it. Also speed is a huge factor. I acted too fast. The most common ways for people to check scams are reviews. And there we have to be very careful. We are often communicating simple tricks and tips to consumers on how to check for scams. However these do not work. In the beginning of this century we communicated to consumers check if a website has an SSL certificate. The lock you see at the top of the screen. It's free nowadays. Every scammer has an SSL certificate. But in countries like India, Italy, Kenya they're still using this to check if a website is valid or not. Same with reviews. My own government in the Netherlands is telling consumers to check reviews. But we know that 20 to 30 percent of all reviews are fake. So it's really an issue. So we have to be very careful in what we educate consumers. My general advice is take time and ask your friends and family. Because scams are getting so good that you need more brain power to recognize them. Reporting is also becoming a global issue. Most people no longer report scams because they think it doesn't make a difference or it's too complicated or they do not know where to report to. And this is a serious issue because if it's not reported then the crime nobody will pick it up. I mean the criminal goes free. So as I said we only see the tip of the iceberg regarding scams. Globally we estimate that seven percent of all scams are actually reported to law enforcement. And the figure differs very strongly per country. We see that scams are now either number one or number two most reported type of crime. In the United Kingdom 38 percent of all crime reported to law enforcement is now related to fraud. And in Singapore this figure is more than 50 percent. Scammers are also going professional. In Nigeria there's currently a big social debate because some parents are telling their children don't go to school go to scam school because at least then you make money. And there's a big discussion going on in the Nigerian press. Is this the way we want to go? Scams are also being democratized in the sense that they're becoming technology wise very very easy. You can just buy online an investment banking website or crypto trading website for 70 euros and you can start scamming people. It has been made very accessible unfortunately. We also see the rise of scam compounds. In Ghana and Nigeria we already knew there were certain villages specializing in certain types of scams. These are now being mass produced in countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia and others where people are actually being lured to those scam compounds with employment jobs. Their passports are taken away and they're then being forced to scam. And these are not nice places. You're beaten up severely if you don't scam people for 12 hours a day. Scams are also becoming unrecognizable. This is a nice example where AI was used to merge flowers and a kitten into a new product. These flowers do not exist but the scammer was very smart. He was selling the seeds online saying that it takes six months for the flowers to blossom. Giving him six months to sell the seeds online. Likewise with video. I was already saying around dating apps. Often the rule is that the scammer will not show his face. That is no longer true. The scammer does show his face. It might be a deep fake or he simply might not care. So in short at the moment scammers are winning. We see that they are specializing and it's becoming a global business. Where in Israel there are one or two companies which specialize in money recovery scams. Promising the victim that they can recover their money. While actually the chance of recovering your money from a crypto scam is less than one percent. Same in Cyprus. There's a company which focuses only on subscription scams. And my own country the Netherlands unfortunately has a bad reputation with bulletproof hosting. Meaning it's very easy to set up a website in the Netherlands. Very difficult to take down because of freedom of speech rules. So scams are out of control. As I said before 38 percent of all reported crime in the UK is now related to fraud. Only two and a half percent is prosecuted. Globally the world economic forum estimates that only 0.05 percent of all cybercriminals are actually being prosecuted. So at the moment it's a free crime. How can we turn the tide? I do believe that awareness campaigns are important and there are a lot of governments and banks and telecom operators are investing in this. However there's no scientific proof that increased scam awareness actually decreases victimization. The theory behind it is that the more a person becomes educated around scams the more confident he becomes. And the more confident he becomes the more freely he moves around the internet and starts making bad choices. We believe that scams are a global problem and that needs to be solved globally by bringing together all the stakeholders. Law enforcement, governments, brands, the internet society, cyber security companies, consumer protection, social media, banks etc. And by bringing all together all those stakeholders then we can start fighting scams. And that's exactly what the global anti-scam alliance does. We facilitate intelligence sharing by organizing meetups. We have eight email groups to continuously share modus operandi on scammers and what they're doing. We facilitate networking. We organize three summits every year. One in Asia, Singapore, one in Europe and one in America to bring all the stakeholders together to exchange knowledge but also really to define better solutions to protect consumers from scams. We also are setting up local chapters because what we're trying to do on an international level also needs to be done on a national level to define local solutions to local scam problems. We do a lot of research. We publish 30 reports annually about the state of scams in Germany, Brazil, America as I just presented. And finally we are now working on the launch of the Signal Exchange and I will get back to that later. As a non-profit we live by the support of our partners and I think all these partners are benefiting by us facilitating the knowledge sharing between these companies. Some of these companies are competitors but Gaza offers a safe platform to exchange knowledge and insights. The Signal Exchange is our first concrete project where we really want to make a difference. The Signal Exchange allows the exchange of scam sites, phishing sites, bad servers and other cyber criminal activities across the globe. We also offer real-time analysis so the companies can log in and see where their brand might be misused or where their platform is being misused by scammers to operate scams. And finally we offer leaderboards and I think the leaderboards will really make a difference. This is also something typical for a non-profit. So to give you an example, based on all the data we are now getting from more than 80 different data sources we collected all the data into one big database. And you can see that.dk, the extension for Danish websites, they manage 1.3 million domains and have an abuse rate of 0.03% which is very low. The interesting thing is the only thing they actually do is ask for an ID. If you want to have a Danish domain can you show an ID? On the other hand we have companies with very high abuse rates like.top,.site. They manage about 2 million domains and have a abuse rate of 9% which is 300 times the one of Denmark. And our goal is with the Signal Exchange to help these organizations clean up and set up procedures to be less used by scammers. So to summarize what the Global Anti-Scam Alliance does is really bring together all the stakeholders and deliver concrete services and products to help then these companies realize their goals. I hope you found this presentation interesting. If you'd like to join us you're very welcome. Feel free to use our data, feel free to share data with us and join us to share intelligence on scams and protect consumers more from scams. Thank you very much and if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me.