Globe, Banks Partner for Stronger Online Safety; Bank-Related Scam, Spam Messages among 138M Blocked

Globe established partnerships with various financial institutions to strengthen its stance for online safety and cybersecurity. The partnerships resulted in the immediate blocking of over 9 million scam and spam messages in the first half of the year, reflecting gains in a pioneering industry cooperation to combat online bank fraud. 

The total 9,063,698 messages blocked from January to June 15 include messages reported by customers to their respective banks, such as suspicious requests for OTPs and other sneaky ways to pry open their accounts and breach secure platforms. Also among those blocked were messages from blacklisted sender IDs. 

Additionally, Globe blocked 1,119 vishing calls, another scamming scheme where fraudsters call bank customers pretending to be legitimate bank representatives to obtain sensitive information. 

These bank-related messages and calls are among the total 138 million scam and spam messages that Globe blocked in its network in the first half of the year through a stringent filtering system. 

Phishing scams using text messaging and email are on the rise, many of which pretend to be official notifications from the banks.  This has already resulted in a number of depositors losing their hard-earned money to fraudsters.

As early as 2019, Globe created a 24/7 group chat with major commercial banks and Mynt, the operator of GCash, for immediate and direct reporting of spam messages mostly received from their customers. 

Banks can report a phishing campaign that impersonates a URL, domain, or mobile number, as well as other spamming and scamming incidents, and Globe will block them. Globe also offers free whitelisting of official SMS blasting companies, which are the only ones allowed to send messages using a brand or company name.

Globe also recently signed an agreement with Unionbank to enable a faster alerting mechanism, more seamless data-sharing and expeditious filtering of activities linked to online fraud. 

“A lot of the investments we’ve made over recent years have allowed us to have better cybersecurity capabilities. We try to squeeze value out of those investments to make sure that we can reach our clients a little bit more directly. At the end of the day, we feel that their customers are our customers too, so we'd rather make sure that those attacks do not exist within the Globe environment,” said Anton Bonifacio, Globe Chief Information Security Officer.

With its successful relationship with the banks, Globe has also decided to work with online marketplaces like Lazada, and Shopee and provides the same brand whitelisting service as well as 24x7 threat spam/scam intelligence sharing to protect Globe customers that use these e-commerce websites.

Aside from having systems and processes in place, Globe also stressed the importance of customer cooperation and vigilance to prevent cybersecurity issues from spreading.

Globe encourages everyone to report mobile numbers responsible for spam and scam messages by going to www.globe.com.ph/stop-spam.html.  It has also been implementing the #MakeITsafePH awareness and education campaign for responsible Internet use.  These initiatives are supportive of UN SDG No 9, highlighting the roles of infrastructure and innovation as crucial drivers of economic growth and development.

Meanwhile, Globe calls for the rest of the private sector to be more open to collaboration to prevent scams from happening or escalating. It believes that organizations will eventually realize the importance of information sharing from a security sense and a business standpoint as digitalization becomes the norm.

To learn more about Globe, visit www.globe.com.ph.