PLDT and its wireless unit Smart Communications, Inc. (Smart) on Friday said that they continue to crack down on text scams, as Smart purged its network of more than 36,000 mobile numbers involved in phishing, smishing and vishing, bringing the total blacklisted SIMs to more than 200,000.
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. But we remain relentless in protecting the public through a precision approach that clamps down on criminals without sacrificing customer experience,” Angel Redoble, first vice president and chief information security officer of PLDT and Smart, said.
PLDT and Smart have expanded their anti-fraud efforts in cyberspace as text scams often contain uniform resource locators (URLs) that direct customers to phishing sites.
In their statement, PLDT said that in September, 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.
