Sixty-five percent of cellphone numbers being used in Taiwan have been leaked and put up for sale, the second-highest number in Asia, an annual fraud report released yesterday by Gogolook Co (走著瞧) said.
Gogolook Co is the Taiwan-based developer of call-filtering app Whoscall. The “Personal Information Leak” section of its 2022 Annual Fraud Report is based on investigations into personal data leaks in the Asian market and aimed at giving people a glimpse into upstream fraud models.
The investigations were conducted by Gogolook in collaboration with the Criminal Investigation Bureau and Constella Intelligence, an international digital risk protection service provider.
Photo: Liao Yao-tung, Taipei Times
They found that Malaysia was the Asian country most affected by mobile phone number leaks, with 73 percent of total phone numbers in use leaked, ahead of Taiwan at 65 percent and Japan at 56 percent.
Taiwan has about 16 million people aged 20 to 65, and it is estimated that the cellphone numbers of about 10.4 million were leaked and put up for sale, the report said, citing official data.
The top three types of personal data stolen in Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia were the same: passwords, phone numbers and names in descending order, the report said.
However, in Japan and South Korea, the three most common types of personal data breaches were names, passwords and phone numbers, in that order.
Other common types of stolen data included nationalities, e-mail accounts, addresses and birth dates.
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