Google funds $5-million ASEAN campaign to boost scam awareness

Global tech giant Google on Monday announced a $5-million funding program to equip Southeast Asian communities with the skills to identify, prevent, and respond to online scams, including artificial intelligence-driven threats.

The funding will support workshops for about 2,000 master trainers, who will then receive resources to run training sessions in their local languages and raise awareness of scam activities to 550,000 learners across 11 Southeast Asian countries.

The initiative—dubbed SCAM Ready ASEAN—is headed by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Foundation, and locally implemented by the Bank Marketing Association of the Philippines (BMAP).

For the Philippines, an initial 105 master trainers are set to fully roll out the workshops later this year, mostly coming from local banks and the financial industry. They will undergo 10 hours of training and be sent to select programs to raise awareness of scams.

BMAP has also set a larger target of 1 million beneficiaries, mostly youth and senior citizens. It also targets fishers, farmers, and overseas Filipinos, citing the widespread reach of scams.

“We’re looking at December to January as the full rollout, but we start in schools we’ve selected with DepEd [Department of Education] with the Knowledge Channel. We will select schools so that we can roll out, because we have a target to try to get those one million beneficiaries,” BMAP president Catherine Santamaria said.

“We will also have things for senior citizens, the adults, teachers will also be trained, so we actually have a whole plan of how to get through each community,” she added.

Citing statistics from the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), ASEAN Foundation executive director Dr. Piti Srisangnam said nearly 80% of Filipinos have been contacted by a scammer. Nearly $24 billion in losses to scams were also reported in 2024, a number said to be underreported as victims do not report.

Following military operations on the borders of Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, Srisangnam said scam centers have been more widely spread, with activities reported on the borders of Myanmar, in the Philippines, Timor-Leste, and India.

The most common scams in the country, Srisangnam said, are related to luring the public with high returns from financial instruments they do not know, and love scams.

“We teach ASEAN people on digital literacy, how to use AI responsibly, ethically. We also got support from Google as well on another project called AI Ready ASEAN. So far, we’ve reached out to 9 million ASEAN people across 11 ASEAN countries already,” he said.

“We ensure that this project will extend until 2028, phase two, in order to prepare ASEAN for these AI technologies, then we have a strong foundation already,” he added.

The initiative is also backed by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), as deputy governor Bernadette Romulo-Puyat said this complements the existing financial literacy programs of the central bank.

“This just enriches what we already have. In fact, we have financial education with the banks, so what we’re doing now is we’re integrating,” she said.

“With our partnership with the BMP, they’re actually the first to know the newest scams, so we can share common technology, what are the updates. And then what we do is weekly, we have messaging,” she added. — BM, GMA News

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