Hello, customer, this is Director General Kim Ji-young from the Samsung Securities legal team. I'm calling to verify the product you signed up for; please confirm your date of birth.
Is this Lee Seon-a? We found shell accounts under the name of Lee Seon-a at Hana Bank and Woori Bank in a criminal ring recently arrested.
On the 6th, three women in their 20s who visited Meta Korea's "online scam prevention" pop-up store in Seongsu-dong, Seoul, sat side by side at a table and listened closely to the voice coming through their headphones. At a dedicated Financial Supervisory Service booth set up at the pop-up, they took part in a game called "Find the voice!" in which they had to listen to five short call logs and pick who among them was the real voice phishing scammer.
The examples ranged from a man saying he was a "class of '07 alumnus who called using the alumni contact list provided by the school" to a woman presumed to be a bank employee explaining the terms of a loan you signed up for. Some voices were so clumsy and suspicious in their call content that anyone could tell it was voice phishing, but a few sounded as natural as talking to an actual bank employee, making it hard to be sure whether it was voice phishing or not. After deliberating, we chose the call about a shell account as the answer, only to be met with a notice reading, "The correct answer is that all five are voice phishing."
A woman who finished the experience next to them said, "Two or three seemed suspicious, but I didn't expect all five to be voice phishing," adding, "I usually try to be careful, but I think I'll need to be even more cautious when I'm on a call going forward."
From 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. that day, the pop-up store drew about 1,000 visitors. Most were people in their 20s and 30s and foreign tourists who came in after hearing that those who took part in the on-site experiential games would receive simple snacks and a llama plush keyring prepared by Meta Korea. In addition to "Find the voice," there were stations for a simple O/X quiz and a stopwatch game designed to raise awareness of the phone numbers for reporting and consulting on financial crimes. Videos for a scam prevention campaign, produced by Meta Korea in collaboration with domestic influencers, were screened on the walls surrounding the pop-up space. The influencers appearing in the videos introduced types of scams anyone might encounter in daily life and how to respond, saying things like, "If a card you didn't apply for has been issued, assume it's all fake."
The pop-up store was created to introduce various types of online scams one may encounter in daily life and to help consumers identify and prevent them. Lee Seul-gi, director of public policy at Meta Korea, said, "This pop-up store was planned in cooperation with the Financial Supervisory Service so that consumers can identify and prevent online scams more easily and clearly."
Meta, which owns major social media (SNS) and messenger platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, is strengthening safety measures and using artificial intelligence (AI) to prevent online scams and crimes such as impersonation of celebrities occurring on each platform. Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp all have more than 3 billion monthly active users (MAU), and the broad user base makes them targets for criminal rings.
As online phishing and romance scam crimes impersonating celebrities and broadcasters proliferate on SNS, Meta also introduced a "face recognition technology" last month to block them. The face recognition technology is a defensive measure developed by Meta to strengthen its ability to respond to impersonation of public figures and celebrities. Initial tests were conducted last year on some celebrities in the United States and elsewhere, during which the scale of detection and blocking of impersonation more than doubled. Meta said, "Currently, about 500,000 public figures worldwide are being protected from portrait rights violations through this technology."
Impersonation ads on Facebook are first detected by Meta's automated systems, and if the ad image is deemed suspicious, the face recognition technology is used to compare the face in the ad with the profile photos of the actual celebrity on Facebook and Instagram. If impersonation is determined during this process, the ad is immediately blocked.
Meta said it deleted more than 2 million scam accounts last year in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines using detection technologies such as AI. These groups use an infamous scam method called "pig butchering" targeting people around the world via SNS, dating apps and email. In pig butchering, scammers build a relationship of trust (mainly romance) with the victim online, then induce them to invest more and more money and siphon off all their assets. They mainly use cryptocurrency.
In addition, Meta said it uses AI to detect depictions of violence and other content in video, images, audio and text, invests billions of dollars each year in safety and security, and deploys about 40,000 employees. Through this, accounts and posts deemed risky are routinely removed.
A Meta Korea official said, "We will continue to work closely with a wide range of partners, including government agencies, to help users communicate and engage freely in a safer online environment."