This Is Not A Scam

The finance and tech industries gathered in Singapore to tackle the trillion-dollar industry of online scams. I went along for the ride.

Asia’s Global Anti Scam Summit (GASS) in Singapore kicked off with a prank. Attendees of the conference were offered access to a ‘fast track’ to collect their badges. In the opening session, we were told 50 people had scanned a QR code on entry, hoping to jump the queue. In their impatience, they had demonstrated how easy it was to fall prey to ‘quishing’ (phishing, via QR code). This was a theme throughout the event: the scam victim was an everyman, essentially honest but vulnerable to manipulation. Even the attendees of a conference on fraud could be defrauded. But Jorji Abrahams, managing director of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, reassured us: the QR code did not infect our phones with malware or steal our credit card information. In fact, it did nothing at all.

Real scams, however, are a big business. As digital communication has been woven into every area of our lives, so too have online scams. According to the National Crime Agency, fraud is now the most common crime in the UK. On a global scale, it is estimated that fraud costs $1.03 Trillion annually, a figure larger than the GDP of Switzerland. The attendees at GASS were mostly from finance, tech, and law enforcement – as a cultural studies scholar, I was something of an outlier – and the opening speaker, Singapore’s Senior Minister of State for Digital Development and Information, Tan Kiat How, referred to us all as ‘the justice league, the scambusters, the good guys.’ Over the course of the summit, ‘good guys’ featured heavily. Scams were understood to be driven less by the pursuit of profit and more by a generic evil, by bad guys exploiting ‘universal human frailties.’ Scams, we were told, are as old as humanity itself. But through ‘partnership and collaboration’ we could fight back. A representative of Global Telecom cheerily announced, ’We are all friends on a mission here’. The self-declared ‘good guys’ were on the stage, talking about consumer education, awareness raising, and information sharing. Who were the bad guys? Who were the scammers?

Keep reading on the Verso blog.