Smartphone scams alarming in Thailand

Whoscall, the leading app to identify unknown callers and prevent smartphone scams, revealed that scam attempts in Thailand increased strongly in 2023.

Whoscall’s report found that Thailand is the biggest target for SMS scams in Asia, as Thai mobile phone users received a total of 58 million suspicious messages throughout the year, and shows scammers use fake links, fake login requests, prompts to download malicious software and fake one-page shopping sites in their attempts to trick the public.

The data was released as part of Whoscall's annual report which studies the behaviour of scamming through incoming calls, messages and links from SMS messages. The study found that fraudsters in Thailand are most likely to use SMS messages to deceive Thais, sending 58.3 million messages in 2023.

The 2023 Asia Fraud Annual Report found that there were 347.3 million phone and SMS scams worldwide, a 14% decrease from the 405.3 million incidents recorded in 2022. In Asia, the regional fraud trend decreased for the second consecutive year due to cooperation to raise awareness of online fraud threats between governments, businesses and the public.

However, the study found Thais are at greater risk than ever before of falling victim to online fraud with 79 million fraudulent calls and scam SMS messages attempted, an 18% increase from 2022's total of 66.7 million.

During 2023, Thais received 20.8 million scam calls, up 22% from 17 million in the previous year. The fraudulent SMS messages increased by 17% from 49.7 million in 2022 to 58 million in 2023