Digital skullduggery

The House of Representatives has passed a bill to fight digital fraud. It is urging the Senate to adopt the measure for speedier enactment of the law.

How effective it can be as a tool against digital fraudsters bears watching. The scammers seem to be always one step ahead of the cybercrime police. The law requiring SIM registration, for example, has barely made a dent in stopping cyber scams.

The cops will need help from other countries in dealing with this transnational problem. Amid digital scams, deep fakes and the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence, even Merriam-Webster dictionary (not AI) has picked “authentic” as the word of the year 2023.

Here’s a cautionary tale on inauthentic digital operations.

Someone I know recently received a message from her brother on their family’s Facebook group chat page.

The brother wanted to borrow P20,000 for some unspecified purpose. Since it wasn’t the first time that he had done this, and it was the family’s supposedly private group chat, the sister agreed, but said she could fork out only P15,000. She did not bother to talk with her brother by phone or in person.

An account in BPI bearing the brother’s name was provided, and the sister sent the P15,000 through her GCash account. The brother’s son, who received similar messages through the FB chat group, sent another P20,000 by bank transfer to the same BPI account.

A similar FB message was sent to the sister’s son, who immediately smelled trickery because he never received FB messages from his uncle.

As it became clear that a scam was underway, the real brother discovered that his FB page had been hacked. Another of his sons alerted the sister about it, but it was too late; the P15,000 (plus the P20,000 from the other son) had been deposited in the bogus account about half an hour earlier.

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The family is still trying to go after the scammer, but the sister isn’t too optimistic about it. She was told that the hacker had created a “mule account” of her brother’s bank account. In such a scam, the genuine account is used by scammers to collect or transfer stolen or laundered funds.

If a mule account is uncovered, the genuine account may be closed and