The scale of the losses justifies the alert. Over the first six months of 2026, these authorities recorded nearly 17,000 victims of online scams. In total, they lost the equivalent of 300 million euros.
The monitoring is not limited to text messages. It also covers exchanges conducted via WhatsApp or Telegram, two messaging services widely used for these contacts.
Detection relies on artificial intelligence. Anti-Scam Pango flags a suspicious phone number or a text that resembles the hundreds of thousands of messages already used by online scammers.
As soon as one of these signals is identified, a red alert message appears on the smartphone screen. The warning is displayed during the conversation, at the moment when the user can still choose what happens next.
Singaporean authorities are encouraging residents to use Anti-Scam Pango, an artificial intelligence application that reads private conversations on smartphones to detect online scams.
The operation is continuous. Once downloaded onto a smartphone and left permanently on standby, the application analyzes all messages arriving on messaging platforms.
Nothing is imposed at this stage of the exchange. The user remains free to continue the conversation, or to stop it and report the suspicious number to the messaging service.
Online scams are a major issue in Asia. In Singapore, the tally for the first half of 2026 measures losses that are already considerable, while the proposed application aims to display the alert before the suspicious exchange continues.