Camarines Sur 2nd district Rep. LRay Villafuerte (Rep. Villafuerte's office)

Camarines Sur 2nd district Rep LRay Villafuerte believes newly-installed Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) Secretary Henry Aguda can "do wonders" in the fight against online scams.

In a statement Thursday, April 3, Villafuerte said that Aguda "can put to use his extensive experience and expertise in digital transformation in the corporate world to possibly do wonders for the government’s drive to check surging cyberfraud".

And with most cyberattacks targeting smart phones, the veteran congressman said the new DICT head honcho would do well to work with Congress, pertinent government agencies, private telecommunications companies (telcos) and other stakeholders in revisiting the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) Registration Law amid the continued surge in text and online fraud that this new regulation was supposed to overcome.

Villafuerte was a lead author of Republic Act (RA) No. 11934, or the “SIM Registration Act", which President Marcos signed in 2022 to put an end to text and online fraud.

The former Camarines Sur governor is also the majority leader of the bicameral Commission on Appointments (CA), which screens major presidential appointees.

“For the government to get RA 11934 right this time, Secretary Henry needs to give priority attention to a revisit and overhaul of this seemingly ineffectual regulation by working with its CICC (Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center) along with the Congress, NTC (National Telecommunications Commission), NBI (National Bureau of Investigation), PNP (Philippine National Police) and other concerned institutions with an eye to a far more synergetic and effective multisectoral approach to combating text and online scams,” Villafuerte said.  

He made this call following a report from mobile security firm Appdome that the Philippines faces financial losses of $1.5 billion or P86 billion this year alone from cyberattacks targeting celfones, which are often the go-to devices of many Filipinos when they make digital payments and other online transactions.

Appdome co-creator and CEO Tom Tovar was quoted in a media interview as saying that among the digital threats worldwide are mobile “Trojan” attacks, which look like “seemingly legitimate” smart phone applications like expense trackers or photo and video editors.

“But inside that application there is another code, malware that is being used either to monitor your behavior, harvest your personal information, or worse, perform account takeovers,” said Tovar. “They (hackers) take your username and password and send them away to a server and somebody sells your username and password on the dark web.”

Once sensitive information like e-wallet details have been obtained from scam victims, Tovar said that hackers can take over these digital accounts and get the money of the victims.

Appdome’s Mobile Consumer Survey in 2024 showed that 54.7 percent of Filipino consumers use mobile applications more than the web, and that 61.6 percent of the respondents claimed  they use e-wallets, mainly for their payments.