IMSI 'spoofing' gadgets

COMMONSENSE

- MARICHU A. VILLANUEVA

"Spoofing" is when someone disguises an email address, sender name, phone number, or website URL, or uniform resource locator. Often, spoofing just changes one letter, symbol, or number to convince you that you are interacting with a trusted source. But it is a cybercrime technique where someone or something impersonates a trusted source to gain access to personal information, money, or data.

A surge of "spoofing" cases last week prompted the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) to issue an alert cum warning. CICC executive director and concurrently Undersecretary of the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) Alexander Ramos issued immediately the alert/warning following detection of a sudden surge of this particular cybercrime activity. Ramos disclosed the latest victims were account holders of GCash and Maya, the two biggest electronic money (e-money) service providers in our country.

"We are seeing more and more scam texts inserting itself into legitimate GCash or Maya SMS," the CICC chief announced.

The CICC chief warned that this latest cybercrime technique illegally captures the short message service (SMS) of mobile phones, whether it has post-paid or prepaid SIM (subscriber identification module) card. In simple terms, it's a form of text scam in which these scammers are capable of creeping into legitimate message threads like those issued by GCash and Maya.

According to Ramos, both GCash and Maya have already been bombarding their respective account holders and other customers with advisories and alerts/warnings. The two biggest e-wallet service providers are operated by the two giant telecommunications companies (telcos), Globe and Smart, respectively.