Online Scams Have Become a Global Problem

Online scams are a huge business and have become a full industry with sophisticated supply chains of services, equipment and labour.

- Paul J. Davies

Key groups in this sector also have direct connections to nations such as Russia, China and North Korea. What has long seemed to be just a lot of low-level crime has grown into a global, geopolitical problem.

You are still your own best defence against losing money to online scammers, but the volume and sophistication of attacks are only increasing. Governments must do more to help defend their people, companies and institutions. Cybercrime is a national security issue, and the entire system — from major hacking attacks to everyday phishing — should be taken as seriously as drug trafficking or terrorist financing.

To be fair, the problems have not been completely ignored, but national efforts have tended to focus on large-scale and direct ransomware attacks on states themselves, or their biggest services, such as healthcare. But these are just the tip of a massive iceberg.

Worldwide losses are hard to track, but potentially huge. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance, a group formed of technology and finance companies as well as specialist consultants, estimates that in the past couple of years, consumers have lost more than US$1 trillion (S$1.35 trillion) each year to scammers. That is the same as Switzerland's gross domestic product.