Over 73 per cent of cell phone numbers in our country, or approximately 21 million people were leaked or sold to scammers last year. According to the Gogolook 2022 Annual Fraud Report, Malaysia was granted the unwanted title of being 1st place in cell phone numbers breached by the global security company.
In a joint press release by Gogolook, it was also revealed that the top private information leaks were login passwords and names. These were followed by address, country, date of birth and email leaks.
The report further asserted that the leaked data may lead to stolen online banking or social network accounts. When scammers get access to names, phone numbers, and even payment and shopping records, they can easily initiate phone and message attacks.
If names and addresses are leaked, people may soon receive “unsolicited packages with payment requests on arrival”. Moreover, leaked private information usually leads to fraud or scam cases.
Besides that, Whoscall, which is powered by Gogolook also identified that over 405.4 million scam calls and messages took place last year. Results also showed that scammers prioritise text messages for high penetration rates due to its low costs feature which contributed to 76% of messages being used as the ’first contact’ in fraud cases.
The Gogolook 2022 Annual Fraud Report looked into private information leakage and upstream operations in the scam industry chain across countries Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Korea, and Malaysia. It was published in collaboration with Constella Intelligence, an international digital risk protection service provider in an effort to enhance public anti-fraud literacy.
For more information on the report and the Whoscall app, visit its official Facebook page here. As always, make sure to stay tuned to TechNave for more trending tech news.
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