THE Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) reported a significant rise in complaints during the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year, with scammers increasingly targeting victims through social media rather than traditional text messaging.
CICC received 3,251 cybercrime complaints in the first quarter of the year, 72 percent higher than the 1,891 complaints reported a year ago, said Marco Reyes, CICC cyber forensic consultant, during EJAP Inc. and San Miguel Corp.’s Annual Business Journalism Seminar in Tagaytay City on April 5.
Most of the complaints for the first quarter were related to consumer fraud, similar to the 2024 full year’s complaint report.
Shift to social media
“The biggest is the consumer fraud (complaint), with perpetrators who previously targeted victims via SMS now shifting to social media platforms,” Reyes said.
Last year, CICC data revealed 10,004 cybercrime complaints, averaging 27 per day.
Of these, 6,776 were related to consumer and online fraud, while the remaining complaints involved issues such as unsolicited communication, illegal access, identity theft, sexual cybercrime, phishing and harassment.
As the artificial intelligence (AI) industry grows and more people gain access to AI tools, scams are being committed faster, Reyes added.
Gogolook, a global leader in TrustTech and developer of the Whoscall app, in a report noted a 43 percent decline in text scams in the country at 648,239 in the first quarter, compared to 1.14 million text scams in the same period last year.
Surge in scam calls
However, scam calls surged by 225 percent to 351,699 in the first quarter from 108,157 scam calls in the first three months of last year.
Mel Migriño, Gogolook Philippines country head, attributed the decline in scam messages to effective reporting mechanisms, increased public awareness, and the “collective efforts of the Filipino people, government agencies, and private sector partners in combating fraud.”
However, the rise in scam calls suggests scammers are adapting their tactics, necessitating continued vigilance and adaptive countermeasures, Gogolook said.
The breakdown of scam messages in the first quarter of 2025 showed that loan availment schemes were the most prevalent, accounting for 55 percent of cases, based on Gogolook’s report.
VIP rewards scams followed at 24 percent and collection-related scams at 10 percent. Transaction verification scams comprised 5 percent, while delivery and job application scams each accounted for 3 percent.
