Smart Communications Inc. said Friday it purged more than 36,000 mobile numbers in its network involved in phishing, smashing, and vishing, bringing the total blacklisted SIMs to more than 200,000 as of end-September.
It said the initiatives helped prevent more than 51 million text scams from reaching customers in the same period. Smart said that since it boosted efforts against ‘smishing’ in January, it had 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,” said PLDT Inc. and Smart first vice president and chief information security officer Angel Redoble.
PLDT and Smart expanded their anti-fraud efforts in cyber space as text scams often contain uniform resource locators (that direct customers to phishing sites.
PLDT and Smart prevented around 1.4 billion attempts to access malicious domains in September. Darwin G