A mix of excitement and anxiety filled “Paulo” as he stepped off a cab at the departure area of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia) Terminal 3 on Oct. 4. He was flying to Thailand, his first trip out of the country.   

Everything had happened so fast. It was only on Sept. 14 that he saw the Facebook post of recruiter Laisa Magallanes offering the job of a telemarketer in Mae Sot, a town in Thailand near the border with Myanmar, with a monthly pay equivalent to P47,514 plus 1% commission, and there he was at the airport three weeks later, just hours away from starting a new job and, possibly, a bright future.

After checking in, Paulo was told to proceed to the Bureau of Immigration (BI) counter for his exit stamp. 

He was in line when he was jolted by a phone call from a woman—the escort that his recruiter had said would meet him at the airport terminal on the day of his departure—and she was angry with him for queuing at the BI counter. She tersely told him that he was departing as an airport employee, not as an overseas worker or tourist.

Paulo was then instructed to go down to the arrival area’s Bay 13. He was met by the escort’s assistant who handed him an ID pass showing him as an employee of an airport concessionaire as well as a new set of clothes, and asked for his passport. 

“After that, I had a bad feeling and started to worry. So I texted Laisa that I wanted out. She berated me, and said I would have to pay for all the expenses she shouldered,” he said in a statement to the Senate committee on women, children, family relations and gender equality that opened an inquiry on Nov. 22 into the trafficking of Filipinos to Myanmar. 

Agitated, Paulo pressed for the return of his passport. It was eventually handed back to him at a coffee shop outside the terminal, but only after the escort’s assistant had scribbled “VOID” on it. But he was surprised to note that his passport bore the BI exit stamp when he did not even reach the BI counter. 

After getting a refund on his travel tax, he hurried out of the terminal to hail a cab. He was afraid for his life, and he ignored the advice of airport tourism personnel that he report what had happened to the airport police.  

“In the next few days, I learned of the plan to bring us to Myanmar. I also learned that many reached Myanmar without passing through immigration, but by disguising as staff,” he said. 

‘Pastillas Scam Part 2’

Paulo’s case blew the lid off the possible involvement of Philippine immigration and airport personnel in the large-scale trafficking of mostly Asian nationals by criminal gangs running cryptocurrency fraud out of Myanmar and its neighboring countries.  

“This is like ‘Pastillas Scam Part 2, but much worse and much more aggressive,’’ Sen. Risa Hontiveros said, referring to the 2020 scandal that exposed BI personnel’s acceptance of P10,000 payoffs to facilitate the entry of Chinese nationals to work in Philippine offshore gambling operations (Pogos).

“Are the airport security personnel involved? Are the BI or airport officials in the pockets of the illegal recruiters?” Hontiveros said. 

The “pastillas” scheme saw peso bills rolled inside paper wrappers—much like the way the milk-based candies are wrapped—changing hands between the Pogo workers and immigration personnel. 

The Office of the Ombudsman last year ordered 45 immigration officers and personnel dismissed in connection with the “pastillas scam,” which came to light during an inquiry by Hontiveros’ committee into crimes involving Pogos. 

With this new trafficking scandal involving Filipinos, Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla has ordered the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to look into the issuance of security passes to potential victims at Philippine airports.  

“We will not spare anybody in the investigation even if it includes employees of the BI,” Remulla was quoted as saying in reports.

As the BI finds itself in the spotlight anew, its spokesperson Dana Sandoval said the bureau was not ruling out the possibility that its own personnel were involved in the modus operandi.  

“We are gathering information and evidence to identify the BI personnel who could be involved in the scheme,” Sandoval said. 

Various ways

There appear to be various ways by which unsuspecting Filipinos can be smoothly hustled out of the country.  

Paulo said he met with Laisa Magallanes, his recruiter, at a cafe in Pasay City on Oct. 1. It was there that Magallanes said an escort would help him clear the BI counter on the day of his departure for a fee of P30,000, which would be deducted from his prospective salary.

“I didn’t quite understand it because I was traveling overseas for the first time,” he said.

True enough, on the day of his departure, the escort’s assistant met him at Naia Terminal 3 and handed him his passport so he could check in for his AirAsia flight.  After check-in, he was told by the airline staff to proceed to the BI counter. 

He was eventually diverted from the BI counter to the bay section of the arrival area, where he was issued a fake airport pass and new clothes. But he decided to back out.  

Other recruiters had other ways of going around otherwise tough immigration rules. 

“Rita,” one of the 12 Filipinos rescued from the clutches of the Chinese syndicate in Myanmar, was prepped early on by her recruiter to pass herself off as a tourist to Thailand by carrying a round-trip ticket with an open booking. 

“They also booked us at a hotel for two days so that the immigration officer will see that we’re traveling as tourists,’’ she said in a joint briefing with Hontiveros after the latter opened an inquiry into the trafficking of Filipinos to Myanmar.

It was in Myanmar, Rita said, that she learned that if any of the Filipino recruits encountered any problem at the BI counter, they should be quick to insert money bills amounting to P10,000 or P20,000 in their passport before presenting it to immigration personnel.

“So if before, there is an inbound padulas (payoff) of P10,000, there’s also an outbound padulas of P10,000,’’ Hontiveros said.

FB announcements 

Like other Filipino recruits before them, both Paulo and Rita found the Facebook announcement on the Thailand job with perks too enticing to pass up: no placement fee, no hidden charges, all expenses provided by the company, 2 days off a month, free food, stay in a condominium, birthday allowance.

For Paulo, it was Magallanes’ own FB page, but for Rita and the rest of the 11 rescued Filipinos, it was the “POGO SECRET FILES” FB page.

“If you apply today, you’ll get your ticket tomorrow. You just wait for your flight, Rita said. However, she added, her recruiter demanded an “assurance fee” of P10,000 to P20,000 for the processing of her travel documents. 

Unlike Paulo, she saw her recruiter—a certain Len—only during a video call, her face partly covered by a mask. 

Said Hontiveros: “One of the most sinister of the FB pages, and probably there are more like it, is called POGO SECRET FILES. This is a private page and this means that there’s an administrator who vets the members. It’s an extra layer for the authorities who want to crack this modus.’’   

The senator called on the NBI and Philippine National Police (PNP) to go after the administrators and owners of the Facebook pages, as well as the Telegram groups “that are part of the syndicate’s operations.” 

CoverStory tried but failed to reach Migrant Workers Secretary Susan Ople for comment. Last Nov. 24, the government-run Philippine Information Agency reported Ople as saying that her department was working with the PNP’s Women and Children Protection Center in documenting the testimony of the victims for the filing of charges against their traffickers and recruiters.

“Sen. Risa Hontiveros is correct when she said in her press conference, that these Pogo-type of operations in Myanmar and in other parts of Asia as well, do operate and are luring Filipinos to work there with promises of a six-month contract and a high salary,” she said.

“The operation of the Chinese syndicates is a bit sleek, and I will not be surprised if there are syndicates also operating in remote areas here in the Philippines,” she added.

Last August, the government banned the deployment of Filipino workers to Myanmar in view of the civil unrest and the rising incidence of illegal recruitment and human trafficking there.

The post Trafficking Filipinos: Are immigration, airport personnel involved? appeared first on CoverStory.

Tantalized by the promise of being paid P50,000 a month, “Betty,” a single mother of four in Navotas City north of Manila, didn’t think twice about grabbing an opportunity last April to work as a call center agent in Thailand.

Before the month ended, the recruiter had arranged the Covid-19 antigen tests for her and another recruit, as well as the processing of their travel documents, and booked their flight. Everything had been smoothed over, and they only needed to pack their bags. 

But soon enough, their excitement turned into dread.  

Instead of a three-hour direct flight to Thailand, they were taken on a circuitous journey through southern Philippines, alternating rides in vans, planes and ships, staying for a month in Sarawak, Malaysia, then flying to Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, crossing a river by boat, and finally landing on the outskirts of Myanmar.  

They arrived at Shwe Kokko Yatai New City Project in Myanmar’s southeastern Kayin state, the fresh batch of recruits trafficked by Chinese triads to work as scammers in multibillion-dollar online gambling operations there.   

“We thought we’d be working as call center agents,” Betty said in a statement. “We were given a profile picture to use. We would talk to a client, befriend him and convince him to invest in cryptocurrency. It involved deception. It turned out we were working as scammers.’’  

After pleading with her recruiter, following months of abuse that nearly killed her, Betty was allowed to go home last Oct. 17. 

With the help of a Philippine nongovernment organization and its international network, authorities rescued 12 other Filipinos on Nov. 19 from the online scam centers in Myanmar. 

Baited and tricked

In the last few months, law enforcers rescued hundreds of workers from Asia, Africa and Europe who were similarly baited by a social media ad and tricked into working for the Chinese mafia in the scam zone. There could be at least 31 Filipino “scam workers” that also needed rescue, according to Sen. Risa Hontiveros.       

Until their own rescue, the 12 Filipinos had been subjected to abuse and torture, especially if they didn’t generate revenues from the scam that often entailed sweet-talking the clients into investing in cryptocurrency via online chat, and if that didn’t work, engaging them in online sex.  

And given the Filipinos’ proficiency in English, the syndicate planned to form an “all-Filipino team’’ of scammers in Myanmar and in other countries of operation, Hontiveros warned in a privilege speech at the Senate plenary hall on Nov. 21.  

“These Chinese mafias are making the Philippines an incubator of scammers,” she said in the speech she delivered a day before she opened an inquiry into the trafficking of Filipinos to Myanmar, which has been under a state of emergency since the February 2021 military coup that deposed the government of Aung San Suu Kyi.  

The 12 Filipino recruits—who responded to a Facebook page advertisement on the alleged lucrative job in Thailand that came with some perks—were made to believe they’d be taking calls from foreigners as call center agents or encoding data in a gleaming building in Thailand. 

All that vanished when they crossed the border from Thailand to Myanmar in a boat under cover of darkness, escorted by armed guides, and were herded across the border into a building also crawling with men carrying guns. 

Protocols 

According to “Rita,” one of those rescued, the first order of business was to create a fake account on Facebook, LinkedIn and other dating apps using the profile picture of one of their colleagues to scour for prospects on social media. 

Once they gain the confidence and trust of the prospective client, they ask for his number on the messaging apps Telegram and WhatsApp to ensure regular communication. 

The syndicate’s protocols hew close to those of a call center. The recruits are told to insert investment topics into the chats, and end chats with unqualified customers. 

They are also instructed to find out the specific time the prospective client goes to bed.  Evenings, they are told, are the perfect time for chats because it’s when most people feel empty and lonely, and need company. The goal is “to make him like you, trust you, depend on you, and want to get you right away,” per the protocols.   

Thus, like call center agents, they rehearse a set of spiels covering a wide range of topics including sports, music and financial investments, depending on the profile of their customers who are mostly based in Canada and the United States. In the end, each has to package herself as an elite Asian career woman over 32 years old.

Spiels 

The syndicate’s scam blueprint, which Rita furnished the Senate committee on women, family relations and gender equality chaired by Hontiveros, included such spiels as: “I am a New Yorker in the United States. I am motivated to travel”; “I listen to less pop music except for Taylor Alison Swift”; “I like playing basketball, and I am a fan of the Lakers. But since Kobe left, I have not dared to watch the Lakers game again”; and “After dinner, I usually watch the news and research cryptocurrencies.” 

One of the personalities they assume when dealing with clients is that of a fictitious Claudine Wong, marketing manager at Accenture, graduate of Nanyang Technological University Singapore and USC Marshall School of Business, with “over 10 years of career in business management, team leadership and customer service with Fortune 500 companies.”  

“We pretend to be successful people, wealthy managers and all that. The goal is to gain the trust of the client,” Rita told reporters in a joint briefing with Hontiveros on the opening day of the Senate investigation. 

“I am able to convince one client professionally because I’m a marketing manager but the others had to engage in a relationship just to gain the trust of the client. So they chat every day,” she said.

After hearing their stories, Hontiveros concluded that the entire operation had two sets of victims: the trafficked and the scammed. 

“Additionally, [there is] the heavy impact on the victims’ mental health, not just of the scamming, but also of having to sustain sexual and romantic relationships online… and somehow feign sexual desire just to convince one to invest in crypto and avoid the heavy hand [of the mafia],’’ she said. 

But at a certain point they have to cut to the chase and introduce cryptocurrency investment into the chat.  

Once the customer agrees, he will be asked to invest an initial capital of $1,000. By design, the Chinese mafia will let the customer win in the trading, which they control, and withdraw his earnings, according to Rita. 

“In the second trading, when the clients add more money into their capital, the scam begins. They won’t be able to withdraw their money anymore,” she said. 

Heavy price for failure

Failure to con a client into investing in the scam came with a heavy price for many of the Filipino recruits.  

In the case of Betty from Navotas, she was made to stand for 15 hours and to do duck walk for three hours, and was hit with a thick notebook in the head for minor infractions such as being slow in swiping cards. 

At other times, she was made to carry brick stones for four hours, and then made to run after this, and if she was slow in running, hit with a ball in the back, or worse, whipped or subjected to electric shocks.

There was a time she suffered a cut on the chin while doing sit-ups as a punishment, her hands holding a ball behind the back, and was never treated for it. She sent her family a photo of herself in that state, and “they thought I was going to die,” Betty said, adding:

“I was once placed inside the black room or bartolina. I was just given four pieces of pandesal and a bottle of mineral water. Before that, I was subjected to electric shocks.’’ 

Throughout her stay, Betty managed to earn only $1,000 from the bitcoin trading scam—an amount just enough to pay for her expenses there. On seeing her pitiful condition, new Filipino recruits pooled their money together to pay for her travel back to the Philippines in October.

Rita was “lucky” because, she said, “I performed well in the eyes of the Chinese. If I felt crushed, the other Filipinos felt more crushed because there were times they had no clients, no customers, no one to con. So they’re subjected to verbal abuse, threats, 12 to 16 hours of duty.”

The Chinese mafia members trusted Rita so much that they were grooming her to be the next recruiter of Filipinos, Hontiveros said. “There’s no end to the abuse.”  

‘Preferred location’

In a Nov. 9 analysis, the US Institute of Peace said Myanmar has emerged as the “preferred location” of operations for trafficking and online gaming rings, partly because its army has survived on revenue from organized crime.

For as long as the military regime holds power, the institute said, “organized crime will spread to new parts of the country and increasingly pose a global security threat.”
“This human trafficking crisis is just one example of how Burma’s illegitimate military regime damages the security interests not only of its neighbors, but [also] of countries as far away as the United States, where ads for lucrative tech jobs in Southeast Asia have recently begun to appear in California,” it said.  To be concluded

The post Trafficking Filipinos: Philippines becoming ‘incubator of scammers’ appeared first on CoverStory.

“It’s a way for me to move forward. I’ll talk and you write,” she said. 

Michelle’s story, the proximity of it, was chilling. Up until then, I had only read about strangers caught up in romance scams. (Inquirer.net reported on a Nigerian posing as Janifer Natalia, a Yemen-based US Army member, fleecing his Filipino victim of P400,000. Rappler wrote about Rod, who paid P60,000 in three payments to be able to collect a box sent by David, an American serviceman he met on Grindr. He realized it was a scam when he was asked for a fourth payment.)

That it happened to a woman I know to be level-headed was shocking and intriguing. What made her let her guard down?

Instant connection

Perry sent Michelle a friend request on IG, and she was circumspect in performing the requisite digging before accepting: Google reverse image search and checking other social media platforms. She also looked out for repeated questions throughout their chats, and there were none. (Repeat questions are clues that scammers are working with others, and signal that they are taking over a “shift.”) 

He had texted that he was an engineer for a utility gas company in Los Angeles—a difficult job, he said, but it paid well. His colleagues called him Perry, never Seojun Juwon. He was a paw parent to his only family in LA, Jack and Lucci, a pit bull and a Pomeranian, respectively, that he drove to a dog sitter before he went to work. He did the laundry or went to the gym on weekends. Coffee was breakfast. He was a Chelsea FC fan and his favorite color was the club’s signature royal blue. His mother was living in Jeju in a house he’d bought as a gift for raising him after his father’s passing.

He confessed to loving Michelle at first sight, but she’d brushed it aside, telling him he was simply overwhelmed at having someone to talk to.

To my raised eyebrow, Michelle quipped: “Nope, I didn’t, but he was interesting.”

“Didn’t you ever think that he was just too good to be true?” I asked. 

“Nothing stuck out as a red flag,” she retorted. 

Related: Trafficking Filipinos: Philippines becoming ‘incubator of scammers’

Michelle was done in by the chemical trio of oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine, manipulated by smooth-talking Perry, which, “under the right conditions, work as a team to make us feel butterflies,” wrote Alexandra Owens in www.psycom.net. “Whenever we’re with someone who we’re attracted to…our brain releases dopamine, serotonin levels increase, and oxytocin is produced—you get that buzz love songs are talking about.” 

Dosed by love hormone 

Romance scammers are geniuses in softening their marks using “social engineering [by analyzing] what you post, what you like, your interests [and] use this information [to] gain your trust, and make you fall in love with them…,” Marni Marcos, former director of the Philippine National Police Anti-Cyber Crime Group (PNP-ACG), said in a Rappler interview. 

Perry was attentive and sweet, and had witty repartees. Michelle was oblivious of the oxytocin working its magic. The love hormone is released when people bond socially—i.e., talk—but new studies indicate that the bonding depends on the circumstances. It doesn’t always necessarily signify a willingness to bond or make people happier. 

“Oxytocin seems to act like a volume dial, turning up and amplifying brain activity related to whatever someone is already experiencing,” said Robert C. Froemke, PhD, a neuroscientist studying oxytocin at New York University, in an interview with Owens. 

Perry was apparently stellar in creating the right circumstances for emotional responses from Michelle, and “regulating pro-social behaviors [like] trust, empathy, positive memories, processing of bonding cues, and positive communications.” For example, he enthused over them having the same music preferences (no hard rock) and being animal lovers (Michelle liked cats). They laughed at their text errors: She’d typed “bed” instead of “bread” and he’d mistyped “cabbage” as “garbage” in a salad. 

The catalyst for Perry’s spell was the specific effect of oxytocin on women vis-a-vis men. Oxytocin in men, wrote Owens, “improves the ability to identify competitive relationships and navigate their fight or flight response.” In women, it’s the feeling of kinship that is heightened because of the higher levels of oxytocin. 

“The more we engage in these feel-good behaviors, the more oxytocin we get,” added Owens. 

Big business

Romance scams are highly lucrative. In a February 2021 report, Emma Fletcher of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said US victims have lost $1.3 billion to romance scams over the past five years, “more than any other FTC fraud category, with [consumers losing] a record high of $547 million in 2021.” The median individual reported losses were at $2,400.

Fletcher, an FTC senior data researcher, hypothesized in a CNBC report that the pandemic “may have helped people to fuel the continued growth by attracting more people to online dating apps and social media.”

There was an increase in people paying scammers with gift cards like Google Play, Amazon, Steam, or iTunes, which are a popular mode of payment because they’re easy to find and buy in physical or digital form.

The FTC report also cited a growing trend in 2021 of romance scammers luring people into fraudulent investments. The scammers make their online victims believe they are successful investors, casually giving investment advice on cryptocurrency or foreign exchange trading. Both money and scammer disappear when the victims follow through with the advice. A total of $139 million in cryptocurrency was lost last year to romance scams, with the median individual reported loss at $9,770.

“Pig-butchering” scams, aka crypto-romance scams, is a new twist in the classic romance scams playing out in Southeast Asia with “headquarters” in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. They’re “run like companies, complete with promotions, bonuses, increments, and marketing departments,” and staffed with willing or duped scammers from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Turkey, according to a two-part special report by channelnewsasia.com. The old romance scam is spiced up with investment schemes that allow the victims to receive profits from their initial investments, lending legitimacy to it. Actually, they’re prize pigs showered with love for months to get their money, then “butchered” when the money dries up. 

Global Anti-scam Org (Gaso) said nearly 2,000 people from at least 46 countries particularly in the United States and Europe have lost $310 million in total since the organization’s formation in June 2021. But there might be a deficit in the figures because many victims fear being shamed or ridiculed, said Grace Yuen, Gaso media spokesperson. Its survey of 509 respondents revealed that 66% of the victims were women in their late 20s to early 30s—easy pickings because they aren’t “as sharp as men”—and 34% were men. The victims were from varied professions (i.e., architect, math professor, research scientist, aircraft mechanic, public servant, paralegal, engineer, etc.). Gaso was formed in response to the rise in pig-butchering scams outside of China. 

In the Philippines, National Bureau of Investigation Cybercrime Division chief Vic Lorenzo warned Filipinos of romance scams after a victim lost P17 million. “Cases of love scams began rising during the pandemic because nearly everyone was online. Most of the culprits are Filipinos,” he said in a CNN Philippines interview, highlighting that the local scammers copied from the Nigerian grifters’ playbook.

In a separate plnmedia.com report, the PNP had up to 100 cases of romance scams reported to it this year, but ACG said the number may be higher because the victims are ashamed to be named. 

A 2021 study by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky on the future of digital payments in Asia-Pacific showed that one in two, or 45%, of people surveyed in the Philippines and SEA, lost money to romance scams because the “social media platforms provided a critical connection for people,” the Manila Bulletin reported. 

The Baby Boomers and Silent Generation comprised 33% of the victims, with two in five losing from P255,000 to P510,000; Gen Z made up only 8 percent, losing over P510,000 to romance-related threats. 

The grift

Perry didn’t exhibit the top signs of a scammer. He didn’t work on an oil rig or in the military, and wasn’t a doctor with an international organization. Michelle parried his declaration of love earlier on. His IG showed clear selfies, and he never asked for money for hospital bills or emergencies.

He was just sending her a package containing shoes, which, when it “reached” the Philippines, was supposedly now filled with gadgets, cosmetics, accessories, and, much to Michelle’s consternation, $25,000. She called Perry for an explanation, but he didn’t take her calls. He clarified via text that the money was a surprise for her and reimbursement for the customs clearance fee, as well as payment for his hotel during his planned visit in November. 

The scammer finally surfaced: He gaslighted Michelle in subsequent texts, blaming her for ruining everything, not trusting him, and putting him in a bad mood. It was typical grifter behavior because “a romance scammer may pressure you to stop ‘being paranoid’ and urge you to trust them no matter what,” Lynn M. English, Lafayette Federal Credit Union’s senior vice president for risk management, said in the company website. 

Michelle hadn’t quite picked up on the scam yet because “FastDoor Standard Courier Systems” appeared legitimate with its tracking receipt and confirmation texts from an employee, “Bryan.” So she paid the “customs clearance fee” via online transfer to a personal bank account. Then Perry started sounding ridiculous in his texts, repeatedly advising her to be polite to the courier company for making it wait. Bryan also started badgering her to pay P95,000 for the “International Monetary Fund (IMF) certificate” supposedly needed to release the package. 

Reality check: The shipping company was a sham; its confirmation e-mail went straight to Michelle’s spam folder. The IMF cautioned against fraudulent schemes using its name on its website because it “doesn’t authorize, verify, monitor, or assist in contract or inheritance payments between third parties and/or Governments, or endorse the activities of any bank or other public or private agency.”  And the Manila-based Bureau of Customs accepted payment through e-wallet Maya (formerly PayMaya), which has been the norm for the past two years. 

Aftermath

Realizing she’d been hoodwinked, Michelle unfollowed Perry and blocked the shipping company that same day. But Perry showed her how unrelenting scammers could be by sending a new friend request and calling her on IG the next day. She blocked and deleted Perry’s IG. Persistent, he sent a text through WhatsApp using a Nebraska number days later. She reported, blocked, and deleted the number. It’s been quiet ever since.

After a long radio silence Michelle texted her sad story. Going after Perry, for her, is futile because of the ignominy of it all, and the problem of establishing his identity. Scammers either impersonate someone or make up their online profiles using stolen pictures. It’s certainly one expensive lesson she’ll never forget.

I forwarded Lynn English’s words to Michelle: “…Perfectly intelligent people fall victim to scammers every day. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

A smiley emoji flashed on my phone screen.

The post Oxytocin and a smooth talker are the drivers behind romance scams appeared first on CoverStory.

For over 10 years, Marie, 40, had not logged out, and could not readily remember her log-in details. While looking for them, she received two phone calls from FB friends—one asking why Marie had blocked the friend, and the other verifying if Marie had indeed changed her name to that of a new boyfriend. Still another friend sent a screenshot of Marie’s FB profile and picture: Her name had been replaced with that of a male. 

Marie eventually found her log-in details, but her username and passwords had been changed, locking her out. “I’ve been hacked,” she said sadly.

Last February, the website of CNN Philippines was also hacked. Users could not access the network that was then hosting a presidential debate for the May 9 elections. Earlier, other media outlets in the Philippines experienced repeated cyberattacks, according to Kaspersky, a multinational cybersecurity and antivirus provider based in Russia.

Mid-November in 2021, the online outfit PinoyMedia Center was overwhelmed by traffic. The following month, the portals of ABS-CBN News and Vera Files also came under fire. Rappler, an online news organization, was likewise attacked several times a month in the last quarter of 2021.

Related: Independent media’s critical role in social transformation

Flooding of media sites 

Kaspersky said the media organizations were victims of Distributed Denial-of-Service or DDoS, a cybercrime involving the flooding of media sites to cause heavy traffic and deny entry to users.

Marie and the media outlets are among hundreds of individual and corporate or institutional victims of cyberattacks that have grown during the coronavirus pandemic and in different forms. In the first few months of the health emergency, the number of cyberattacks surged by over 200%, the Office of Cybercrime under the Department of Justice reported during a webinar on cybercrime trends in July 2020.

An explanation given for the trend was that people who had to stay home were conducting most of their activities online, whether working, surfing, studying in virtual classes, or attending Zoom webinars. More had become exposed and vulnerable to cyberattacks and crimes.

According to the Philippine National Police (PNP) Anti-Cybercrime Group, the identity theft of Marie and intrusions into her social networking account are common during the pandemic. The other offenses include online selling scams, phishing or smishing, SIM (subscriber identity module) card swap, online libel, profiteering, content-related, spreading false information, and estafa or swindling.  

The top three crimes are phishing attacks, online scams, and trolling and misinformation.  

Ransomware

In a study, Sophos, a British-based cybersecurity software and hardware company, noted an increase in ransomware attacks on corporations and institutions. It found that 69% of organizations surveyed in the Philippines experienced ransomware, an attack that encrypted systems and files for a ransom in 2021. 

Ransomware is a crime like kidnapping, with decryption keys or access to files in the victim’s computer held for ransom. It is a malware designed to deny a user or organization access to its own computer files; access is regained through the easiest and cheapest way: paying the ransom.

The uptick in cyberattacks was also observed by Kaspersky Security Network (KSN), the cloud-based threat intelligence service of Kaspersky. In a news release last February, KSN said it had monitored cyberthreat attempts logged on devices of Kaspersky users in the Philippines, ballooning from 9.5 million in 2017 to 50.5 million in 2021—an increase of over 430%.  

On malware, it discovered an average of 380,000 new malicious files daily, up by 20,000 in 2021 compared with the previous year.

A report by Asia Foundation cited a Kaspersky study stating that 37% of online users in the Philippines experienced some form of cyberattack in 2020.

Economic impact

The online crimes resulted in downtime and disrupted services that inconvenienced users and customers. Aside from lost opportunity costs, the victims suffered direct costs, such as repair and reconstruction of infrastructure (hardware, programs and files).

Potential economic losses in the Philippines due to cyberattacks can reach $3.5 billion, or 1.1% of gross domestic product, according to a 2018 study by Frost & Sullivan commissioned by Microsoft.

Last year, Philippine organizations incurred expenses to rectify the impact of cyberattacks at an average $1.34 million, including costs of downtime, people time, device cost, network cost and lost opportunity cost, according to Sophos. 

The finding is part of Sophos’ annual report, State of Ransomware 2022, issued last April. The firm surveyed 5,600 information technology (IT) professionals in mid-sized organizations of 100 to 5,000 employees in 31 countries last January and February. It had 150 respondents from the Philippines and was vendor-agnostic, meaning they were also from organizations that did not use cybersecurity software.

The 69% of Philippine organizations that reported ransomware attacks in 2021 was slightly higher than the global average of 66%. The figure was also higher than the 42% of victim-firms reported in 2020 and the 30% in 2019, indicating a swell in ransomware cases in the country.

Ransom payment

Ransom payment also rose to an average of $1.6 million, twice that of $820,000 in 2020 and double the global average of about $812,000 last year.

Compared to other countries surveyed in the study, the Philippines was the third highest in terms of average payments in 2021, next to Japan ($4.3 million) and the Netherlands ($2 million). Other countries that paid ransom higher than the world’s average were Israel ($1.3 million), India ($1.98 million), Singapore ($1.16 million) and Malaysia ($899,000). The lowest ransom was paid in Turkey (about $30,800).

Ransomware attacks are rising not only in the Philippines but worldwide. The global average for firms reporting ransomware attacks almost doubled from 37% in 2020 to 66% in 2021.  Cases of successful encryption by hackers (e.g., they were able to deny access) also went up from 54% in 2020 to 65% in 2021.

Online scams

Syndicates and organized crime have also targeted individual users for monetary and financial ends. In October 2020, the Department of Justice’s COO, an agency created under Republic Act No. 10175 or the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, warned of a surge in phishing electronic mails (emails), vishing (voice/phone call), and smishing (SMS/text) in relation to online banking. 

In the three forms of “shing” cybercrimes, a perpetrator poses as a legitimate institution, such as a bank, an online payment site, a tour operator, or an online commerce site and devises a message through email, phone call, or text message, respectively.  The messages often contain links to websites that lure victims into revealing their personal information to include banking and credit card details, and usernames and passwords. The information is used by the perpetrator to access the victim’s account in illegal or fraudulent transactions.

Last June, Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. and Smart Communications (PLDT-Smart) said it had blocked over 23 million smishing text messages in a span of three days. From January to May, it reportedly blocked more than 600,000 text messages linked to smishing, hoaxes and spamming, and almost 78,000 SIMs related to smishing, “more than double” that of the same period last year.

Globe Telecom Inc. said that in 2021, it blocked a total of 1.15 billion scams and spam messages, around 7,000 mobile numbers linked to scammers, and 2,000 social media accounts and phishing sites. 

What can you do?

With the seemingly nonstop activities of cybercriminals, Filipinos are advised to be extra cautious and to get into the habit of practicing “cyber hygiene,” or regularly scanning devices for viruses, changing passwords, updating apps, software and operating systems, and wiping hard drives. 

The PNP Anti-Cybercrime Group issued these to-dos: enabling system firewall, using different and strong passwords, using  antivirus and anti-malware software, activating email’s anti-spam blocking feature, using Two Factor Authentication (2FA) for all online services, encrypting local hard disk, and shopping only from secure and known websites. 

For parents, the advice is to monitor their children’s online activities.

Globe Telecom has also encouraged smartphone users to get automatic anti-smishing filters on messaging apps to help block spam or scam messages from unknown senders.

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