PLDT and Smart Communications continue their relentless efforts to stop text scams.
In September, Smart purged 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.
PLDT and Smart have expanded their anti-fraud efforts in cyberspace as text scams often contain uniform resource locators (URL) that direct customers to phishing sites. In September alone, PLDT and 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.
PLDT and Smart’s Child Protection Platform also remain hard at work blocking around 220,000 attempts to open online sexual abuse and exploitation of children (OSAEC) in September. So far, PLDT and Smart have blocked more than 1.3 billion attempts to access OSAEC materials after identifying around 465,000 URLs related to online child abuse.
See also: Text scams are costing Filipinos millions of dollars said CICC
The initiatives to keep children safe online underscore PLDT and Smart’s commitment to SDG 16 on promoting just, peaceful and inclusive societies including the end to abuse, exploitation, trafficking, and all forms of violence against and torture of children.
