Online scams are the second most reported type of crime, Kendrick Lee, Director of National Digital Identity at GovTech Singapore told a packed out theatre room whilst delivering his keynote presentation at Identity Week Asia 2023.
The event, which took place at the Suntec Convention Centre in Singapore’s big bank city centre last week, attracted visitors from across vast swathes of the APAC and facilitated a huge gathering for decision-makers in the identity industry.
Opening the show, Kendrick addressed Singapore’s technology measures to combat cyber crime, namely their reusable digital identity offering called Singpass which is used prevalently by banks and authorities.
With the threat of online and financial crime exceeding physical threats, Singapore’s government has protected citizens using Singpass and a step-up advanced verification leveraging biometrics. The findings of a recent report, commissioned by the government, delved into the technology advancements and direction towards using passkeys and FIDO standards, over outdated passwords to authenticate users of banks and public services.
The report published fraud analytics and the work of the digital government exchanging working group in tackling verification and authentication methods to stand up to sophisticated criminals.
The Anti-Scam centre has been one hands-on approach to giving customers a physical support mechanism, working in conjunction with UK universities to set up an observatory for scams with $300 Million investment.
The high spokesman for GovTech Singapore said the centre will cater for incidents requiring quicker response times by banks and police and aim for customer regulation to be implemented, which is ongoing throughout 2023.
The pace of scammers adopting flexible strategies to overcome even the newest of technologies is alarming, with tactics used by scammers constantly evolving from SMS spoofing, to call spoofing and selling accounts.
The recovery of valid digital identities is vital, this message was repeated throughout this presentation to open the conference. He also headlined digital wallets as the future of payments innovation which will also change how we hold our digital and identity credentials to authenticate into all types of cross public-private services.
“We need to safeguard digital ID domestically“, Kendrick Lee said.
