LETTER FROM MEXICO

Phishing, pharming, smishing, call spoofing... online scams still have English names, with no Spanish equivalent. Yet Latin America, and Mexico in particular, has become the preferred playground for cybercriminals looking to empty private bank accounts.

According to a recent study by the Belisario Dominguez Institute, the Mexican Senate's research center, some 15,000 financial frauds take place every day in the country, a record in Latin America. "The National Institute of Statistics estimates that nearly 15% of the Mexican population has already been a victim of fraud, which is one out of every five users. And in 92% of cases, the fraud is successfully completed," explained researcher Juan Pablo Aguirre Quezada, the study's author.

Citizens aren't the only ones whose assets can suddenly disappear. "The central bank, the tax authorities and Mexico-based UN offices have all acknowledged that they have been 'defrauded.' Large corporations don't communicate very much on the subject in order to avoid revealing their fragility, but they have also fallen prey," he added.

Another survey, carried out by the National Commission for the Protection and Defense of Financial Services Users (Condusef), indicates that phishing is the most common scam, accounting for 40% of fraud nationwide.

Few people in Mexico have not received a call, supposedly from their bank, warning them of a "problem" with their account and requesting confidential information in order to "resolve the situation." "The best thing to do in such cases is to hang up immediately and call your bank, because, generally, the call didn't come from them," explained Alejandra Sanchez Inzunza, co-founder of the Dromomanos journalists' collective.

On May 3, €54,000 held in Dromomanos' bank account vanished in a few clicks, and, with them, the employees' next paychecks. "The banks' customer service response is to immediately make you bear the responsibility," said Sanchez Inzunza. The scammers' technique is tried and tested: redirected to a perfect imitation of their bank's website, via an advertisement, email or text message, the victim is prompted to enter personal information that will enable their money to be stolen.

Dromomanos, which had to launch a fund-raising campaign after this mishap, has since been waging a legal battle to obtain a refund while, simultaneously, investigating online scams: "The magnitude of the problem was made clear to us after the amount of personal testimonies that we received during the campaign. It seems that bank employees are often involved in fraud. This is certainly linked to their low salaries, and there is probably also a structural problem linked to the way that banks operate in Latin America," said Sanchez Inzunza.

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