Sorry if I’m curt and cold

☎️ Hi, is this Jene?

Me: Who are you? Where are you calling from?

🙏 Pardon me if my phone greeting is curt and cold nowadays. 

80% of the calls I pick up tend to be scam calls, claiming to be from DHL, ICA or someone who claimed to be a friend and asked why I didn’t recognise their voice. 

Yesterday I picked up one more who asked me to go down to a physical location to pick up something free. This sounded like those timeshare schemes which were prevailing some years ago but seemed relatively naive nowadays. 

 

Today,  I also read this article on The Business Times  about how scam rates continue to increase in spite of all the education to date. 

“The bait may differ – be it spoofed SMS links, QR codes, websites, calls from authorities and so on – but the pattern is the same: befuddle victims into revealing their online banking login name and password. This is why banks have such a major and critical role to play in stemming online fraud.

You are not wrong if your answer is human foibles. Fear, insecurity, greed and complacency are what scammers tap to persuade victims to divulge their security codes.

I would argue, however, that scammers would be far less successful if a physical token – a so-called hard token – is required to authorise suspicious transactions. In a world where anonymous and unidentified bad actors can empty your bank account virtually in minutes, the old-fashioned lock and key is the bulwark to stop, or at least slow, the theft of your money online.” 

🍇Without a better solution in sight, and the losses heartbreaking to the victims, a physical token might be a good way to go in my opinion. However, hopefully it’s a single sign-on token for all banks instead of the past where we need to carry a bunch of “grapes” with us every day to transact.  

What do you think ? 

#digitaltrust #consumer #data #tech #banking #scam  #phishing  #sgtech #transformlifesg #jenetalksdigitaltrust