Text scam incidence down, says DICT

The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said Friday that text scams have continued to decline nearly two years following the enforcement of the SIM Card Registration Act, with only 193 reported daily complaints.

At the plenary deliberations on the DICT’s P7.8-billion proposed 2025 allocation, Makati Representative Luis Campos — the budget sponsor — reported that daily complaints had plummeted from 121,826 in December 2022 to 193 as of September this year.

Before the law took effect on 27 December 2022, Campos narrated that the reported cases were 51,874 from September to December 2022.

“Currently, the average daily number of complaints recorded is now 489.37. So the drop in documented complaints is substantial,” Campos said.

Despite the reported decline, Representative France Castro and Representative Arlene Brosas stressed that the DICT still needs to double its efforts to put a stop to the proliferation of text scams, the sole objective of why Congress passed the law.

“Spam and scam messages are getting worse almost two years after it was enacted. It continues to come in,” Brosas said. “SIM card registration did not solve this.”

Both Castro and Brosas lamented that they have been victims of text scams and fake text alerts about unpaid loans and overdue traffic penalties. The text includes a link, which, if clicked, would lead to a phishing site, stealing personal information.

Campos, however, countered that such text scams “no longer pass through the network or SIM” and came directly to the Internet, which is not regulated by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC).

“According to the 1995 NTC Act, the internet is not a basic service, which falls under the direct regulatory control of the NTC,” Campos said.

“The NTC’s position there is only recommendatory. So, they have to undertake negotiation processes with the internet service providers,” he added.