An anti-fraud alliance revealed that losses from scammers in Asia this year have surged past $130 billion, warning that criminals are increasingly turning to AI.
The Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), together with Gogolook, released a survey report sampling 13 markets across Asia, including Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, and India, finding scam losses over the past year reached $136.5 billion (around 4.6 trillion baht).
GASA stated that 71% of adults in the region have encountered scams; although 66% believe they can spot fraud, 62% still engaged with scammers, and among these, 26% lost money, with 51% of those victims having been scammed multiple times.
Jorij Abraham, managing director of GASA, warned at a regional summit in Bangkok that criminals are using AI to fully automate scams—from selecting victims, sending personalized messages, to conversing and sending fake links.
He said AI-generated messages are five times more effective at deceiving victims than human-written ones, meaning educating the public alone is no longer sufficient; structural-level prevention must also be emphasized.
Abraham expressed concern that dismantling large scam operations in several countries, including Cambodia, hasn’t eliminated criminal gangs but instead caused them to disperse into smaller groups in hotels and rentals across the Middle East, Mexico, and Eastern Europe, making detection harder.
GASA also found phone scams remain the primary method used by criminals (56%), followed by SMS (50%) and chat apps (40%), focusing on scams related to shopping, investments, and job applications.
Jeff Guo, CEO of Gogolook, noted that criminals now use AI to create fake voices mimicking executives or family members, making phone scams much more convincing.
GASA, Gogolook, and Meta representatives agreed that no country or company can handle this issue alone. Meta revealed it has cooperated with Thai police to remove over 150,000 scam accounts and shared lists of harmful websites with other platforms, since scam sites often remain active for about three years even after being blocked on social media, allowing them to appear on other platforms.
Gogolook’s CEO cautioned tech companies not to focus solely on increasing user numbers at the expense of security, saying, "Traffic may build a platform, but only trust can sustain it."
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Source:cna