Whoscall’s report found that Thailand is the biggest target for SMS scams inAsia, as Thai mobile phone users received a total of 58 million suspiciousmessages throughout the year, and shows scammers use fake links, fake loginrequests, prompts to download malicious software and fake one-page shoppingsites in their attempts to trick the public.
The data was released as part of Whoscall'sannual report which studies the behaviour of scamming through incoming calls,messages and links from SMS messages. The study found that fraudsters inThailand are most likely to use SMS messages to deceive Thais, sending 58.3million messages in 2023.
The 2023 Asia Fraud Annual Report found that there were 347.3 million phone andSMS scams worldwide, a 14% decrease from the 405.3 million incidents recorded in2022. In Asia, the regional fraud trend decreased for the second consecutiveyear due to cooperation to raise awareness of online fraud threats betweengovernments, businesses and the public.
However, the study found Thais are at greater risk than ever before of fallingvictim to online fraud with 79 million fraudulent calls and scam SMS messagesattempted, an 18% increase from 2022's total of 66.7 million.
During 2023, Thais received 20.8 million scam calls, up 22% from 17 million inthe previous year. The fraudulent SMS messages increased by 17% from 49.7million in 2022 to 58 million in 2023./.