American News -- CNN host Tank (from left), Facebook parent company Meta's Southeast Asia Public Policy Director Frankel, Washington Post's New Correspondent Mattani, Singapore's Chief Digital Security and Technology Officer Xu Zhixian, and Harvard University visiting scholar Simms attended a dialogue session at the Milken Institute Asia Summit on October 1st.
With China increasing its publicity and law enforcement efforts to combat online fraud, fraud groups have quickly adjusted their strategies, no longer targeting Chinese citizens as the primary target and main labor force for fraud, and turning their attention to Japan and South Korea, English speaking countries, as well as countries with limited foreign resources such as West Africa and East Africa.
Jacob Sims, a visiting scholar at Harvard Asia Center, pointed out at the Milken Institute Asia Summit on Wednesday (October 1) that the Chinese government has increased law enforcement efforts in recent years, sending back Chinese people who have been lured abroad to engage in online fraud and severely punishing fraudsters. As a very shrewd criminal, you will soon understand and stop targeting Chinese people
According to Sims' observation, there are increasingly more victims speaking English, as well as many from countries lacking diplomatic influence, which generally do not have enough funds to rescue their citizens lured by fraud groups.
Japanese and South Korean citizens have become new targets for recruitment by fraud groups, possibly due to limited ability of artificial intelligence to translate Japanese and Korean. Shibani Mahtani, a new correspondent for The Washington Post, said during the same conversation that artificial intelligence has weak translation capabilities for certain languages, so criminal groups must rely on people who understand the local language to carry out fraud. This has changed the recruitment and operation methods of fraud groups, and has also led them to target victims in Japan and South Korea.
Online fraud is becoming increasingly rampant, with a mid year report by the United Nations estimating that hundreds of thousands of people have been scammed into scams in Southeast Asia.
Simms said that hundreds of militarized fraud gardens operated by transnational criminal groups have emerged in Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and other places, some of which have been sheltered by local authorities, forming a complete industrial chain from recruitment, trafficking, training, fraud to money laundering, and can be regarded as the largest economic engine in the region.
In order to protect their citizens, many countries have increased their efforts to combat online fraud. During the dialogue, Xu Zhixian, Chief Digital Security and Technology Officer of Singapore's Digital Department, introduced that Singapore has established a cross departmental anti fraud center, which brings together police, financial regulatory agencies, telecommunications, and banks in the same command center to achieve rapid linkage and account freezing.
Singapore has also passed legislation to crack down on the sale of personal data or opening bank accounts on behalf of others. Currently, Singapore law enforcement authorities are investigating about 500 individuals suspected of selling personal data, with the goal of cutting off the channels through which scammers exchange online funds for cash.
Singaporeans suffered losses of up to SGD 1.1 billion due to fraud last year. Xu Zhixian revealed that the amount of money defrauded in the first half of this year alone exceeded SGD 450 million. Among them, about 80% of the cases, the victims were persuaded to transfer money voluntarily, rather than being invaded by technology.
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