In September, Smart Communications, the wireless unit of network provider PLDT, removed more than 36,000 mobile numbers involved in phishing, smishing, and fishing, from its network. The total number of blacklisted SIMs now stands at more than 200,000.
According to Smart, these initiatives helped prevent more than 51 million text scams from reaching customers in the same period. Since Smart boosted efforts against “smishing” in January, the mobile services provider has stopped close to 400 million fraudulent messages from going through its network.
“Scammers are quick to adapt their strategy,” said Angel Redoble, FVP and CISO of PLDT and Smart. “But we remain relentless in protecting the public through a precision approach that clamps down on criminals without sacrificing customer experience.”
PLDT, Smart employ adaptive strategy vs cyberthreats
PLDT, Smart continue clamp down vs smishing
OSAEC
PLDT and Smart have expanded their anti-fraud efforts in cyberspace as text scams often contain uniform resource locators (URL) that direct customers to phishing sites. In September alone, PLDT and Smart prevented around 1.4 billion attempts to access malicious domains. By the end of September, the two telcos had blacklisted more than 5.5 million domains with URLs tied to phishing, scams, hoaxes, and other fraudulent activities.
PLDT and Smart’s Child Protection Platform blocked around 220,000 attempts to open online sexual abuse and exploitation of children (OSAEC) in September. So far, PLDT and Smart have blocked more than 1.3 billion attempts to access OSAEC materials after identifying around 465,000 URLs related to online child abuse.