Taiwan's front-line battle against why mobile phone fraud

This is like a miniature of the world, here in Taiwan, where we see all kinds of fraud in advance. "We can use this knowledge to protect other countries, because we can see what is going to happen first. The boss of a firm which owns one of the most popular spam blocking apps on the island, and across East Asia in general. Its artificial intelligence powered software constantly trawls more than 1.6 billion telephone numbers, both Taiwanese ones, and also ones from across Asia and other parts of the world, to block messages and calls from likely fraudsters. Working with Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau's 165 Anti-Fraud Program", Whoscall blocked more 52.3 million scam messages, and 13.1 million scam calls, last year in Taiwan alone. But why is Taiwan such a hotbed for telecoms fraud?  The island's small population of 23.5 million makes it a prefect and those from mainland China and elsewhere. They try out a new phone scam in Taiwan, and if then they can expand it out across Asia and then globally. We provide Apple with a lot of evidence... until there is a serious problem. A problem that is not only going to spread out in Taiwan, but also in Asia Pacific, and if they don't take care of it, very soon it will be in Europe and the US. An Investigator tells the BBC that another reason why so many new scams originate on the island is the very fact that Taiwan is one of Asia's top manufacturers of high-tech technology. This level of technical expertise is shared by Taiwanese scammers adds that the coronavirus pandemic was a boom time for scammers as millions of people were stuck at home, and, therefore, more reliant upon their phones. And the Taiwan stock market was very high at the time, so many people earned a lot of money, she says, adding that this led to a big rise in investment scams. Scammers would  give advice on app pages, or they would start a chat group saying that they can tell you when a stock is going to rise, and they can share this intel if you join their group. The scammers would then ask for money for the information. Other such investment scams would see people receiving messages from friendly strangers offering loans at very low rates. Anyone who has lived in Taiwan, regardless of age or nationality, is familiar with one method used by fraudsters. Answering an unknown number leads to you hearing a brief sound, and then a pre-recorded message starts playing. These calls are made by auto-dial systems capable of making hundreds a minute. It's an effective way for the fraudsters to find the working numbers of people who are prepared to answer their phone despite not knowing who is ringing them. In other cases, Taiwanese people are lured overseas to countries such as Cambodia under the false promise of high wages. There they are forced to work against their will as telephone fraudsters.