More than a third (37%) of adults in Southeast Asia believe public service organisations should bear primary responsibility for protecting citizens from scams, with 16% pointing to the government specifically. This is according to the State of Scams in Southeast Asia 2025 Report by Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA).
"Consumers are beginning to see digital safety as the fourth frontier of security, alongside land, sea and air borders. They feel that the governments have the primary responsibility to keep them safe. And these battles today are not fought with guns and tanks, but instead with text messages, deep fakes and phone calls [from the bad actors],” says Rajesh Sandhu, GASA’s advisor for Southeast Asia, at the alliance’s event in Singapore earlier today.
Singapore’s Senior Minister of State for the Ministry of Digital Development and Information and Ministry of Health Tan Kiat How, echoes the call for stronger defences, stressing that partnerships are central to the fight.
“Scams are one of the most globalised activities in the world. Our most important weapon of secret power is… collaboration,” says Tan, who also serves as patron of the GASA Singapore Chapter. He likens the alliance of regulators, law enforcement, technology companies and community partners to a “Justice League” of defenders working against ever more sophisticated and threats enabled by artificial intelligence.
In line with those remarks, Tan highlights that Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech) has joined the Global Scam Exchange (GSE) to commit to exchanging scam signals in real time. The GSE tracks over 400 million threats and allows members to rapidly share information for scam disruption. Co-founded by Oxford Information Labs Research, Google, and GASA, GSE counts Meta and Microsoft among its members. GovTech’s entry marks a step in deepening global public-private collaboration against online scams.
Given the cross-border nature of scams, Loh Yuh Yiing, director of Policy Development & Security at Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs, believes the way to “tackle scams has to be borderless”.
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“We have to make it clear to scammers that it is not possible to be in one country while attacking the citizens of another. That's not a gap that we will allow to go uncovered. ASEAN has proven itself to be a very useful community [in enabling regional cooperation]. Hopefully, with time, we can bring together like-minded parties – not just the countries and the governments, but also the companies and the stakeholders across non-government organisations – to do their part [to fight scams],” she says in a panel discussion at the same event.
She also shares Singapore’s four-pillar strategy to combating scams and building trust. The strategy is captured in the acronym LEAD, which stands for legislation, exchange of intelligence, turning awareness into action and sustaining determination in tackling scams. “While GASA’s research shows that people are calling for governments to take the lead, [building public trust requires] everyone – be it governments, entities, individuals – to take the lead,” she says.
Consumer education push
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According to GASA’s Sandhu, authorised scams — where victims are deceived into willingly sending money to scammers— are now the most dominant form of scams. “It’s no longer just about stolen passwords or hacked accounts. It is about stolen trust; trust weaponised against the very people who hold it,” he warns.
Victims, he adds, are “not careless but they are simply outmatched” by playbooks of psychological manipulation that borrow from behavioural science, neuroscience and even military influence operations. “The more digital our societies have become, the more human vulnerabilities (instead of technical ones) become the entry points of scams,” he says.
That shift has put a sharper focus on consumer education.
To support that, Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, announced US$5 million in funding to support the ASEAN Foundation. The latter will work with local partners to expand online scam-prevention resources for three million people across Southeast Asia.
This includes scaling the educational game Be Scam Ready, which is designed to expose players to common scam tactics in a safe environment so they can better spot the real thing. Google plans an October launch in Singapore and aims to expand to other Asia Pacific markets in 2026 through GASA’s member network.
Separately, Bamboo Builders will launch ScamWISE Squad, an immersive web game under the SG ScamWISE National Education Programme, in 2026. Backed by Google.org, the game draws on real-life scam case studies to create an engaging experience for all ages. It aims to equip 100,000 Singaporeans, particularly youth and seniors, with the skills to defend themselves against scams and online threats.
