The National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) has directed the country’s three mobile telecom operators to continue blocking the subscriber identity module (SIM) cards that are being used to send scam messages.
As incidents of fake job text scams persist, Gamaliel Cordoba, NTC commissioner, issued a memorandum dated June 29 directing Dito Telecommunity Corp., Globe Telecom Inc. and Smart Communications Inc. to continue the process of blocking SIM cards that are being utilized to perpetrate these fraudulent activities and to further increase their public information campaigns to educate the public of the new derivatives of these scams.
NTC also requested the telcos to send a text blast to their respective mobile subscribers, which stood at over 160 million combined, from July 5 to 11.
NTC noted the persistence of fake job text and similar scams in various new forms that remained unabated last month across the telecom networks, targeting the general public.
In a separate memorandum, NTC also ordered all its regional directors and officers in charge to appear before local radio and television stations within their respective jurisdictions to warn the public against the continuing text scams.
Likewise, it instructed the regional NTC offices to step up their local public information campaigns to educate the public of the new derivatives of these scams.
Meanwhile, PLDT Inc. and its wireless unit Smart have blocked more than 23 million smishing messages from June 11 to 14 that contain three uniform resource locators (URLs) identified as phishing sites.
“Smishing” or SMS phishing is a form of social engineering done through text messages that deceive customers into thinking that these messages were sent by legitimate organizations such as banks, recruitment agencies, tour operators and other companies.
From January to May this year, PLDT and Smart also blocked more than 600,000 text messages linked to smishing, hoaxes and spamming.
Globe has also blocked over 138 million spam and scam messages from January to June 15, as part of its effort to curb malicious and fraudulent activities online.
The total figure includes app-to-person and person-to-person messages of both local and international origin.
Globe also deactivated 12,877 mobile numbers from January to May due to spamming, out of customer reports via its stop spam web portal.
