Businesses that sell anti-fraud stuff rarely spend time fretting about the lack of reliable statistics about fraud. If they can find a figure that suggests a need for their product then their ‘expert’ salesmen will repeat that statistic, but they tend not to care about the lack of statistics. This encourages a kind of bias where some people’s lives are treated as more important than the lives of other people. The goal is to influence policy, even if the policy does not reflect the actual priorities if unbiased statistics had been collated instead. For example, a surfeit of bad statistics about Americans leads to their stats being treated as a substitute measure for the experiences of every human in every country, no matter how dissimilar countries are in practice, and irrespective of the unreliability of the methods sometimes used to generate stats about Americans.
Commsrisk is trying to tackle bad statistical habits in the comms sector by compiling our Global Fraud Dashboard, and we are especially keen to construct maps and other charts that compare the experience of fraud and other network abuses between different countries. However, the exercise reveals a kind of data apartheid, where there is a lot of information produced to influence policymakers in some countries, and no equivalent information for other countries. Much of this divide is between the rich and the poor — that is why there are so many more statistics about Americans than other nationalities — but the divide also reflects the priorities set by politicians and law enforcement in each country. Austria is the 13th-richest country in the world when ranked by nominal GDP per capita, but the following is from a recent letter by a reader of Kleine Zeitung, the largest regional newspaper in Austria.
Kürzlich erhielt ich eine klassische Betrugs-SMS: „Hallo Mama, ich habe eine neue Nummer. Schreib mir bitte nur auf WhatsApp. Ruf mich nicht an.“ Diese Masche ist hinlänglich bekannt… Ich wollte diesen Vorfall melden, um möglichen Betrug frühzeitig zu unterbinden. Doch mein Versuch, über verschiedene Polizeistellen Informationen oder Unterstützung zu erhalten, scheiterte kläglich. Die Auskünfte reichten von „Wenden Sie sich an die lokale Dienststelle“ bis zu „Solange kein Schaden entstanden ist, können wir nichts tun.“ Mit anderen Worten: Die Polizei wartet ab, bis jemand betrogen wurde… Warum gibt es als einzige Möglichkeit schwer zu findende „Meldestellen“ im Internet?
I recently received a classic scam text message: “Hi Mom, I have a new number. Please only write to me on WhatsApp. Don’t call me.” This scam is well known… I wanted to promptly report this incident to prevent possible fraud. However, my attempts to obtain information or support through various police departments failed miserably. The responses ranged from “contact your local police station” to “as long as no damage has been caused, there’s nothing we can do”. In other words: The police wait until someone has been defrauded… Why are hard-to-find online “reporting centers” the only option available to us?
The author of this letter has touched upon several important issues:
- Is there a mechanism for the public to report an attempted scam that was unsuccessful?
- If there is such a mechanism, how easily can the public find it and submit their report?
- Is the police involved in collating information about attempted scams?
- If not, then how is the information about scams that actually succeeded being integrated with information about attempted scams that were unsuccessful?
Mid-tier politicians, senior police and technocrats will descend upon Vienna in March 2026 for the next Global Fraud Summit. The event is being organized by INTERPOL and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Funding for the event comes from the UK government, which hosted the last summit of this type, and by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), which means a lot of big internet businesses will be paying hefty fees just to whitewash their tarnished reputations. The attendees will not notice the irony of congregating in a country where the locals struggle to find police willing to receive reports about consumer fraud. That irony is not lost on me. Judging by the output of the last summit, and the endlessly self-aggrandizing publicity tour that is GASA, the Vienna summit will be better at producing selfies and empty rhetoric than small but meaningful changes to policy, such as police forces committing to the proper recording of cases of fraud reported by the public.
All of the research on how to gather data about attempted phone scams points towards one simple conclusion: give the public a button to press on their phone interface. If they can simply press the button, instead of needing to remember a hotline number, or searching for a URL, then a lot more data will be gathered. Not every phone runs iOS or Android — old people in richer countries are most likely to depend on a landline — but updating the interface software for the most common mobile operating systems is a quick and easy way to universalize a solution for data gathering, so long as ‘the button’ can be connected to whichever national intelligence center should be responsible for monitoring attempted scams.
A lot would be gained if Commsrisk can devise a method to collate and regularly update information about the methods that inhabitants of different countries can use to report attempted phone scams. Some of our most effective work succeeds because it shames laggard countries that do less to protect the public from scams than their neighbors. My editorial policy is in direct conflict with the vacuous roadshows run by organizations like GASA; embarrassing people in power will do more good than kissing their arses. That is why I care more about presenting hard data than soft focus selfies. However, systematizing data gathering for even the most straightforward methods — which countries have a phone hotline, or a specific website for reporting attempted scams — will be challenging. If any academic researchers have already tackled this challenge then please let us know. That would be the kind of research that would embarrass world leaders and deserve to be reviewed by anybody sincerely trying to reduce fraud. We could think of it as a Christmas present for everybody.
