Google"s philanthropic arm, Google.org, has announced new funding to fight rising online scams in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. The organization will provide $5 million in funding to the ASEAN Foundation to expand its online scam prevention tools and resources in the region for over three million people in Southeast Asia.
Google"s latest funding is in response to the rising number of online scams and fraud cases in Southeast Asia, impacting millions of users. A new study conducted among 6,000 adults by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) found that about 63% of Southeast Asians experienced a scam in the past twelve months.
With nearly one in four adults reporting financial losses, scammers were able to extort a whopping $23.6 billion over a 12-month period in the region. GASA notes that scammers are quick at finishing their jobs, and about two-thirds of the scams get executed within 24 hours of initial contact.
The study further reveals that adults reported losing money primarily through wire transfer fraud and digital wallets, and about 22% were able to recover the losses partially. It adds that phone calls, SMS, and instant messaging apps are the channels scammers most commonly use.
Google"s funding will also be used to scale an educational game called Be Scam Ready (previously ShieldUp!), which exposes players to common scam tactics in a safe environment to build resilience against online threats, the search giant said. ShieldUp! was introduced in India and expanded to Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand earlier this year.
Apart from that, GovTech Singapore became the first government agency to join Global Signal Exchange (GSE). Co-founded by Google, GASA, and DNS Research Federation, it"s a centralized platform to share threat signals and related data in real-time. It was reported earlier this year that GSE tracks over 180 million threat signals. That number has now increased to 400 million, according to Google.
It"s not just Southeast Asia; rising online scams are a global issue, and different companies are trying to fend off scammers from their platforms. Apple reported that it saved users from losing billions of dollars in fraudulent transactions, and NVIDIA launched AI Blueprint to combat credit card fraud.
Google said in its Ads Safety Report that it prevented 5.1 billion rogue ads from reaching users and fired millions of bad accounts. Microsoft also published detailed guidance on ways to deal with modern AI-powered scams that are difficult to detect.