48% Within Minutes: How Scams Actually Unfold Across Southeast Asia
The GASA 2025 report surveyed 6,000 adults across six Southeast Asian markets. Beyond the US$23.6 billion headline, the data reveals exactly how scams work — the speed, the platforms, the country-level patterns, and why most victims never recover their money.
RTD Team
Run-True Decision
We recently covered the headline numbers from the GASA 2025 State of Scams report — US$23.6 billion stolen, 63% of adults encountering a scam, 48% of stolen funds moving through bank transfers. Those numbers tell you the scale. But they don't tell you how scams actually work in practice.
This post digs into the mechanics. Drawing from the full GASA report (produced with BioCatch and ScamAdviser, surveying 6,000 adults across Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and the Philippines), we examine the patterns that matter most for fraud prevention teams: how fast scams move, where they start, which countries are most affected, and why the current reporting and recovery infrastructure is failing.
The Speed Problem: Two-Thirds Complete in Under 24 Hours
Perhaps the most operationally significant finding in the report is about speed. Across the region, 66% of scams complete within a single day of first contact between scammer and victim. Within that, 48% complete within minutes and another 18% within hours.
The speed varies by country. Vietnam leads at 80% same-day completion, followed by Malaysia (68%), Singapore (67%), and Indonesia (65%). Thailand and the Philippines show relatively slower patterns at 56% and 54% respectively — but even in those markets, more than half of scams are over before the victim has time to reflect.
For fraud prevention, this has a direct operational implication: any system that relies on after-the-fact review, manual investigation queues, or next-day batch processing is structurally incapable of intervening in the majority of scams. When nearly half of all scams complete within minutes, fraud decisions must happen in real time or not at all.
Where Scams Start: Platforms and Communication Channels
The report identifies the primary communication channels scammers use to reach victims across Southeast Asia:
- Phone calls — 62% region-wide, highest in Vietnam (77%) and Thailand (68%)
- Text/SMS messages — 56%, highest in the Philippines (75%) and Singapore (61%)
- Instant messaging apps — 49%, highest in Indonesia (67%) and Malaysia (56%)
- Social media — significant in Vietnam (48%) and the Philippines (50%)
- Email — notably high in Malaysia (73%), less common elsewhere
When it comes to specific platforms, the data is striking. Among those who encountered scams on online platforms:
- Facebook — 53% (the dominant platform across nearly every market)
- WhatsApp — 51%
- Telegram — 36%
- Gmail — 34%
- TikTok — 21%
- Instagram — 19%
Interestingly, the report also examines how quickly scams are recognised on each platform. Scams on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Gmail tend to be identified faster (87–88% within a day), while platforms like QQ, Snapchat, and WeChat see slower recognition — with 22–28% of scams taking a day or longer to identify.
Country-Level Variations: Not One Region, But Six Different Markets
One of the most valuable aspects of the GASA report is its country-level granularity. Southeast Asia is not a monolith — each market has distinct scam patterns, and fraud systems need to account for these differences.
| Metric | Thailand | Indonesia | Malaysia | Singapore | Vietnam | Philippines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scam experience rate | 60% | 35% | 73% | 66% | 77% | 65% |
| Lost money to scams | 14% | 14% | 32% | 21% | 20% | 31% |
| Avg loss per victim | $354 | $115 | $1,035 | $2,132 | $136 | $192 |
| Scams within a day | 56% | 65% | 68% | 67% | 80% | 54% |
| Top scam channel | Phone call | Phone call | SMS | Phone call | SMS |
Several patterns stand out:
- Vietnam has the highest scam experience rate (77%) and the fastest scam completion (80% within a day), but relatively low average losses ($136). The high volume and speed suggest automated or mass-contact scam operations.
- Malaysia has high exposure (73%) combined with the second-highest financial loss rate (32%). Email is uniquely dominant as a scam channel here.
- Singapore has the highest average loss per victim ($2,132) — more than double the next market. Despite strong regulatory infrastructure, the city-state's high digital adoption and affluence make it a high-value target.
- The Philippines shows the second-highest financial loss rate (31%) and the highest daily scam exposure (18% encounter scams daily). Notably, e-wallets (74%) are a far more common payment channel for scams than bank transfers (14%) — the opposite of most other markets.
- Indonesia has the lowest scam experience rate (35%) but this may reflect lower digital penetration rather than better protection.
The Dominant Scam Types: Investment, Impersonation, and “Unexpected Money”
Among those who were scammed, the most common types were:
- Investment scams — 63% of victims (highest prevalence, with 32% experiencing them multiple times)
- “Unexpected money” scams — 58% (advance-fee fraud where victims pay to receive a larger sum)
- Impersonation scams — 58% (posing as banks, government agencies, or trusted brands)
- Shopping scams — 57%
- Employment scams — 50%
The victim testimonials in the report illustrate how these play out in practice. A Thai respondent described a Facebook employment scam that pivoted to an investment app. An Indonesian victim was groomed on social media before being asked to invest. A Malaysian respondent was recruited for a fake job requiring a large deposit. These are not crude attempts — they are multi-step social engineering operations that build trust before extracting money.
The Confidence Paradox: Awareness Alone Isn’t Enough
One of the report's most counterintuitive findings: 78% of Southeast Asian adults feel confident in their ability to recognise scams (rising to 86% in Indonesia). Yet 63% still experienced one. The top reason victims gave for falling for scams? “The scam was very realistic/believable” (22%), followed by “I was attracted to the offer” (18%) and “I acted too fast to recognise the deceit” (13%).
This confidence-vulnerability gap undermines the argument that consumer education alone can solve the scam problem. When sophisticated scam operations use multi-lingual scripts, cloned websites, and social engineering playbooks refined across millions of attempts, expecting individual consumers to reliably detect them is unrealistic. The intervention point needs to be in the payment infrastructure itself.
The Reporting Gap: High Rates, Low Recovery
The report finds that 73% of victims who lost money did report the scam to their payment provider. That sounds encouraging — until you look at recovery rates. Only 22% were able to recover even part of their funds across the region.
Singapore performs notably better here, with 43% partial recovery (supported by regulatory frameworks like the Shared Responsibility Framework). The Philippines is at the other extreme: 74% reported, but only 11% recovered anything — a 14% conversion rate from reporting to recovery.
For the 18% of scam victims who didn’t report at all, the top barriers were:
- Uncertainty about who to report to (35%, highest in Malaysia)
- Belief that reporting wouldn’t make a difference (34%, highest in Indonesia)
- Perceived complexity of the reporting process (19%)
- Didn’t think they needed to report (16%)
Even among those who did report scam encounters to platforms, only 50% recalled any action being taken. Another 21% said no action was taken, and 29% didn’t know.
The Human Cost Beyond Money
The report documents significant emotional and financial impact on victims. 69% experienced at least one emotional impact (52% became more vigilant, 32% grew distrustful of digital tools, 19% reported a drop in confidence). 40% suffered financial consequences beyond the direct loss — including reduced spending (18%), reduced credit access (11%), taking on additional debt (11%), and being unable to pay for basic essentials (10%).
Stress levels were high: 62% found the scam experience stressful, rising to 88% in the Philippines. In families, 15% reported relationship impacts, including blame and social isolation.
What This Means for Financial Institutions
The GASA data paints a clear picture of the operational requirements for effective fraud prevention in Southeast Asia:
- Real-time decisioning is non-negotiable. With 48% of scams completing within minutes and 66% within a day, there is no time for manual review queues. Fraud decisions must happen at transaction speed.
- Country-specific rules matter. A fraud model trained on Thai patterns will miss Malaysian email-based scams or Philippine e-wallet flows. Regional coverage requires market-specific tuning.
- Mule account detection is critical. With 48% of scam proceeds flowing through wire/bank transfers (except the Philippines, where e-wallets dominate), banks need behavioral analytics to identify accounts being used as transit points.
- Recovery infrastructure needs investment. A 22% recovery rate across the region signals systemic failure. Banks that can demonstrate better recovery outcomes — through faster freezing, cross-institution coordination, and real-time alerts — will be better positioned as regulators increase scrutiny.
- Consumer education is necessary but insufficient. The confidence-vulnerability paradox shows that awareness campaigns alone won’t solve the problem. The financial system itself needs to be smarter about detecting and blocking scam transactions before money moves.
Run-True Decision is building a fraud decision engine designed for these realities — real-time decisioning, on-premise deployment, and pre-built fraud detection templates tuned for Southeast Asian payment patterns. Request a demo to see how it works.