MANILA – Globe Telecom announced on Tuesday that in February and March of this year, it blocked a total of 142,575 smishing messages as part of its ongoing fraud detection and filtering efforts.
The carrier claimed it is beefing up its systems to better detect and disable unlawful SMS and web blaster devices.
Globe Chief Information Security Officer Anton Bonifacio said the company is also engaging with the government and partners on threat intelligence sharing efforts and awareness campaigns.
“Smishing is a type of scam in which scammers use mobile text messaging to trick victims into handing over their personal information. “Scammers then utilize this information to gain access to a victim’s financial accounts,” Bonifacio explained.
In 2021, it claimed to have banned 1.15 billion scam and spam messages, as well as 7,000 scammer-linked mobile numbers and 2,000 unapproved social media accounts and phishing sites.
The National Telecommunications Commission ordered DITO Telecommunity, Globe Telecom, and Smart to carry out message blasts from May 28 to June 4 warning the public about job SMS frauds.
This came after a new wave of job-related text frauds surfaced.
The NTC has given the telcos till June 8 to submit a compliance report.