GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

With­in the last two months, Dig­i­cel T&T Ltd has seen a surge in scam­mers ap­pear­ing on­line, ex­pos­ing thou­sands of its cus­tomers to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of be­ing duped.

Ac­cord­ing to Tri­ja­ta Maraj, di­rec­tor of mar­ket­ing and dig­i­tal prod­ucts, this trend is very wor­ry­ing.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, she ex­plained that scam­mers are be­com­ing more so­phis­ti­cat­ed, mak­ing it in­creas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult for cus­tomers to dif­fer­en­ti­ate fraud from fact.

She said nor­mal­ly from Christ­mas in­to Car­ni­val there is an in­crease in the num­ber of at­tempts to de­fraud cus­tomers but this is ex­pect­ed to con­tin­ue through­out 2023.

“What we ex­pect to hap­pen this year, be­cause of what has been hap­pen­ing to the econ­o­my for the last cou­ple of years, we ex­pect that this will not on­ly kick in in­to Car­ni­val but dur­ing the rest of the year,” Maraj said.

She said over the last cou­ple of months there are three main types of scams which have im­pact­ed cus­tomers.

One in­volves the promise of a prize via mes­sages.

“We have seen where the scam says cus­tomers have won this phone or this prize and they need to take these ac­tions to claim it. A lot of the times you need to send a top-up or an au­then­ti­ca­tion code or some sort of in­for­ma­tion to claim the prize,” Maraj added.

Sup­port scams, which see fake pages or pro­files be­ing cre­at­ed to lure cus­tomers in­to giv­ing sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion, have al­so been grow­ing in num­ber.

Pri­or to Christ­mas, Maraj said there was not a lot of this par­tic­u­lar type of fraud oc­cur­ring.

“But now we have had sev­er­al fake me­dia pages cre­at­ed which look very close to Dig­i­cel’s page...a lot of times these sup­port scams put mal­ware on your phone or PC and grab sen­si­tive or per­son­al in­for­ma­tion,” Maraj warned.

Al­so com­mon is the Wan­giri fraud; a Japan­ese word mean­ing “one (ring) and cut.”

It’s a tele­phone scam where crim­i­nals trick peo­ple in­to call­ing pre­mi­um rate num­bers.

Ac­cord­ing to Maraj com­pared to the last cou­ple of years Wan­giri fraud and the prize scam have been most com­mon.
“The sup­port scam is some­thing we have seen re­al­ly kick in over the last cou­ple of months. In the last cou­ple of months we have had four dif­fer­ent pages try­ing to pre­tend to be a Dig­i­cel page.

“There was one In­sta­gram page which used our cur­rent Car­ni­val lo­go, some of our cur­rent pro­mo­tions which we start­ed run­ning in Jan­u­ary and they (scam­mers) start­ed repli­cat­ing that,” Maraj said, not­ing that the on­ly dif­fer­ence was that scam­mers spelt Dig­i­cel with two “Ls” in­stead of one.

“When we first saw the page there were about 270 fol­low­ers. By the time we got In­sta­gram to pull it down the page had about 600 fol­low­ers and that is just one page. The scam­mers would put out these fake pages get you to fol­low and then grab all of your sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion from your hand­set,” Maraj said, re­it­er­at­ing that fraud­sters are be­com­ing a lot more clever.

While it is dif­fi­cult to erad­i­cate scam­ming, Maraj said ed­u­cat­ing cus­tomers re­mains on­go­ing so they too can be aware and pro­tect them­selves against these at­tacks.