Senator Sherwin Gatchalian has urged the Senate to start an investigation into the sudden proliferation of spam and phishing text messages that many consumers have been complaining about since it now includes the receiver’s name.
“It is alarming that while major telecommunication providers claim to have already blocked a significant number of spam and phishing text messages, the problem continues to hound many telco subscribers,” Gatchalian said.
The senator noted that the latest spam and phishing messages have evolved to include the receiver’s name compared to previous random transmission of messages.
Gatchalian said the inclusion of the receiver’s name indicates a breach of consumers’ right to privacy and this breach stirs fear that their personal details may have already been compromised.
Thus, the government must come up with an effective mechanism to stop the spam messages which contain information that appears to come from reputable or reliable source and attempts to obtain a user’s sensitive information such as username, passwords, and credit card details, he said.
Gatchalian noted that in November 2021, an interagency group was created led by the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) to address the problem.
Part of the interagency group are the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), National Privacy Commission (NPC), National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), Department of Justice (DOJ), National Security Council, and Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC), among others.
But despite the existence of the inter-agency group, and the NPC’s initiatives to investigate the proliferation of spam and phishing messages, he said the same privacy issues continue to hound consumers.
For instance, he said PLDT Inc. claimed to have blocked more than 23 million text messages in four days for attempting to get consumers’ personal data.
On the other hand, Globe Telecom also said it blocked over 138 million spam and scam text messages over a six-month period from January to June this year.
“Malinaw na hindi sapat ang mga hakbang na ginawa ng inter-agency group upang matugunan ang problemang ito dahil ang mga subscribers ay patuloy na nakakatanggap ng mga spam at phishing messages (It’s clear that the policies carried put by the inter-agency group is not enough to solve the problem because subscribers continue to receive spam and phishing messages,” he said.
“Higit pang mga interbensyon ang kailangan gawin ng gobyerno para epektibong matuldukan ang mga ganitong mga gawain (The government should come up with better interventions to put a stop to these act