The National Privacy Commission will meet with the National Bureau of Investigation and the Philippine National Police to crack down on smishing activities victimizing mobile phone users.
NPC public information chief Roren Marie Chin said they will also sit down with financial technology companies such as GCash and PayMaya, messaging apps providers and banks in line with their investigation.
"There was already a meeting between our investigation division and the messaging and online payment apps. There will be another meeting this week," Chin said.
She said they will also investigate the possibility that scammers are using an automated scraping and harvesting process to collect names and numbers of their prospective victims.
The NPC is not ruling out the likelihood of a data encroachment, Chin said.
Meanwhile, National Telecommunications Commission consultant Edgardo Cabarios expressed belief that scammers may have gotten the names and numbers of their victims through social media sites, messaging apps and contact-tracing forms filled out by the public during the height of the Covid-19 restrictions.
The NTC has asked Globe, Smart, and DITO Telecommunications to issue text blast warnings to their subscribers from 31 August to September 2022, warning them not to believe in the text scams offering jobs, rewards, or prizes, among others.
