People in Taiwan might have lost as much as NT$239.5 billion (US$7.52 billion) to scams over the past 12 months, an anti-scam research report released on Monday showed, based on a survey of people in East, Southeast and South Asia.
The total losses to scams in Taiwan ranked fourth behind those in South Korea, Singapore and Japan, a survey of 13 countries and territories conducted jointly by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, Gogolook and ScamAdviser, a Web site legitimacy checker, showed.
The total losses in Taiwan was estimated proportionally from a survey of 5,003 Taiwanese, who each lost an average of US$1,940 to scammers, amounting to 1 percent of Taiwan’s GDP last year.
Photo courtesy of the Yunlin County Police Department
The survey, which collated responses from about 25,000 respondents over three-day periods in June and July, was also conducted in China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, said Kara Yang (楊莞儀), a PR staffer at Whoscall, an app developed by Gogolook.
The US$1,940 loss per capita represented a 67.7 percent increase from the previous year, second only to South Korea, where individual scam losses nearly doubled from US$1,384 to US$2,738 during the same period, Yang said.
Only 2.74 percent of Taiwanese — the lowest of any group of respondents — said they would be willing to accept an offer to receive US$20,000 on the condition that they send US$19,000 to another bank account and keep the remaining US$1,000, the survey showed.
In contrast, 20.8 percent of Indians would consider participating in such a scheme, the highest in Asia.
While only 17 percent of Taiwanese respondents said they were “not confident at all” in their ability to recognize scams, the share of those who felt “confident” or “very confident” dipped to 55 percent, down 5 percentage points from the previous year.
Whether that decline was caused by the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) was not specified, but at least 65 percent of respondents said they were aware of the use of AI in scams such as generating dialogues, mimicking voices or creating images and videos.
Meanwhile, phone calls and social media posts have overtaken text/SMS messages as the most common scam delivery methods, with social media scams ballooning to 55 percent, an increase of 21 percent from last year.
Among all social media platforms, Facebook had the highest rate of exposure to scams (63 percent) for two years in a row, where scam tactics primarily involve fake investment experts or analysts luring victims to invest in or purchase fraudulent financial products.
The most common type of scam in Taiwan was identity theft, with 24 percent of victims having experienced it, the survey showed.
The primary way of paying scammers was through bank transfers at 39 percent, the survey showed.
Only 6 percent of Taiwanese have gotten their money back after being scammed, the survey showed.
Meanwhile nearly 30 percent said they would not report being scammed because the procedures were too complicated and they did not believe it would help even if they did report it.
An initial version of the study was released based on countries and areas, Yang said, with a more comprehensive version set to be published later this month.
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