The Global State of Scams and the Impact they have on Consumers

I’ve just read the Global Report produced by GASA, available here: https://www.gasa.org/research The report has been created from a global survey of 46,000 respondents across 42 markets across the world.

Here are a few key takeaways from the report:

• Whilst 73% of respondents believe they can detect a scam, 57% of respondents claim to have had a scam experience in the past 12 months, with 23% losing money, and a staggering $442B lost to scammers.

• It also appears that scam experiences are more prevalent in South America and Oceana regions.

• The most prevalent scams were shopping, unexpected money and investment scams, with 54% of respondents experiencing shopping scams in the past 12 months.

• In terms of financial losses, the impact appears to be more severe in developing countries, in terms of vulnerability to being scammed and the most vulnerable to losing money including counties such as Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Pakistan, UAE, Philippines and Malaysia.

• In addition, even though the highest losses are experienced in countries such as Austria, Saudi Arabia and Australia, the biggest impact in terms of GDP loss per country is in developing nations such as Nigeria and Kenya.

• In terms of users reporting scams, 20% of respondents who experienced a scam in the last 12 months did not report it to anyone with reasons such as not sure where to report to, not sure it would make a difference, it did not seem important enough to report.

• Other reasons cited included emotional barriers with guilt, fear and being ashamed to report it, especially in markets such as Africa, South America and Asia, which is not surprising as in those markets it is common that the victim has been careless in some way.

• Globally, the impact of scams is both financial and emotional and a third of respondents say they are more vigilant of scams.

• As a result of scams, the majority found the experience stressful.

• The most common channel for communications used by fraudsters globally were phone calls, text messages and emails.

•  Consumers believe that public (35%) or commercial(35%) bodies should be responsible for protecting them from scammers, but amazingly 23% believe it is their own responsibility.

The report provides details of organisations that provide education about scams with Insurance companies and banks coming top in terms of reporting, blocking and reporting, with telcos ranking lower down which I find surprising since they provide two on the key channels that fraudsters are using, being voice calls and text messages.

There also needs to be more tools available to consumers to help them rather than just educate them. There already is anti-virus software that can detect scams and viruses, and data breaches, and solutions provided by telcos to detect and block scam calls like solutions from Hiya and Telesign, network security solutions that detect and stop users from going to malicious websites.  In addition, SMS’s can be inspected for malicious content and blocked. And the list goes on…So why are these measures not working?

In terms of self-help, there are now tools such as Bitdefender Scamio and other scam co-pilots that consumers should be educated about and even offered by commercial organisations to provide proactive support. Starling bank in the UK has launched such a service that is AI powered and provides such proactive protection for consumers.

What else should be done to help consumers from being scammed as it is clear that the fraudsters are getting smarter, and scams are on the increase even though consumers feel they can spot scams themselves.