Meta, Facebook's parent, is working with local authorities to tackle online scams in Thailand, particularly fraud and deception. Meanwhile, the Digital Economy and Society (DES) Ministry says Meta needs greater transparency to take down online scam adverts.
To date online scams have caused losses of 50 million baht per day with an average of 200,000 cases per year causing an estimated loss of 30 billion baht, according to the Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau.
"Scams are a highly adversarial space with sophisticated, well-funded and well-connected criminal networks across multiple countries and multiple platforms and they operate offline too," said Hazelia Margaretha, Meta's APAC public policy manager for economic policy.
"We are constantly evolving our techniques to keep pace with changing behaviours online and dedicate resources to protect users from fake accounts and other inauthenic behaviour as well as working with Interpol and partners in local authorities."
She added that the company is removing content that purposefully deceives, willfully misrepresents or otherwise defrauds or exploits others for money or property. This includes content that promotes fraudulent activities using Meta services.
"We use artificial intelligence [AI] as the frontline to find content and accounts that violate Meta policies and have 40,000 staff globally to review content," said Ms Margaretha.
Meta is focusing on accounts with a high probability of violating policies, setting up dedicated channels for users and law enforcement to report scams, and rountinely removes fake accounts.
As outlined in its second-quarter Community Standards Enforcement Report, Meta took action against 676 million fake accounts on Facebook globally, with 98.8% proactively identified and removed via AI.
In December 2022, Meta handled 1.1 billion items of spam content, 95.3% of which were detected proactively via AI.
"It's important that ads on our platform are not used to promote deceptive behaviour. Our policy prohibits misleading and deceptive ads, including scams. If we detect them, we will immediately remove them," said Ms Margaretha.
"We go beyond just reviewing individual ads as we also monitor and investigate advertisers' behaviour and may restrict accounts that don't follow our advertising standards. We are always exploring ways to expand these methods and tools, including ways that people can report ads to us."
Ms Margaretha shared tips on how to spot illegal activities and impersonation ads, such as checking the spelling of an ad's content or whether the ad leads to the authentic website of the brand or a business Facebook users are engaging with.
Meta has worked closely with the DES Ministry through its reporting and was able to take action against hundreds of accounts. From there, Meta was able to carry out further investigations which identified bad actor networks and removed an additional number of networks.
She acknowledged that systems sometimes cannot detect these scams as a highly adversarial space as criminals use cloaking, impersonation, clickbait and phishing attacks. For example, bad actors may use image overlay to avoid detection or use different captions in different languages.
Wetang Phuangsup, deputy permanent secretary at the DES Ministry, said Thailand is among the top five users of QR code payments, with a high penetration of e-commerce and high speed affordable internet which exposes the country to online scams.
Between January 2022 and March 2023, Thailand had 360,000 online scam cases, or around 700 cases per day, of which 40% involved e-commerce fraud.
Mr Wetang said the DES Ministry uses three strategies to reduce online scams: protection by sharing information and through education; blocking illegal websites; and tackling mule accounts.
He added that Meta is working faster to block illegal content, rising from 50 URLs per day to 400 per day or 12,000 per month.
However, in terms of taking down scam ads, Meta might consider making it more transparent, he said.
"Financial and investment scams are our priority to preempt issues and build confidence with businesses and investors, which is a key driver of Thailand's digital economy," he added.
Pol Col Jessada Burinsuchat, superintendent of the High Tech Crime Division at the Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau, said online scams in Thailand averaged 200,000 cases per year and caused losses of 30 billion baht annually.
The top five fraud categories out of 14 categories involved online shopping, scamming people to carry out an activity in exchange for money, lending apps, and call centre and investment fraud.