Influencer

Last Tuesday I received a phone call from an unknown number. As I was expecting a call from an office whose number was not in my list of contacts, I took the call.

The caller turned out to be a woman who spoke English with a thick foreign accent. She introduced herself as an employee of a French company, and she said she wanted to recruit me for a job as an influencer.

All I had to do, she said, was “like” their product on social media, and I would get paid P2,000. I said I was not on social media, and she seemed flabbergasted. Didn’t I at least access TikTok, she asked? Their product is on the platform.

I said I was not interested and ended the call. I should have asked what the product was, but I was too dismayed to realize how unreliable reviews are on social media.

But come to think of it, if political lowlifes can invest in troll farms, why should it be surprising that people are paying to get those “likes” for a product? The technology is available, and there are influencers who do what they’re doing not for the fun but for the fund of it.

Still, it was disappointing to realize that I could no longer rely on the authenticity of product ratings online. I check out the ratings for restaurants, travel destinations, certain products that are hard to find in brick-and-mortar shops, and what’s good on Netflix.

My only consolation is the thought that with the exponential advances in artificial intelligence, human influencers for hire might soon become obsolete. And even if AI influencers become the norm, I’ve already lost trust in ratings and reviews by those with unverifiable identities.

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Maybe if I wasn’t so tech-challenged, the realization would have come much earlier. This week while looking for a pet hair trimmer kit online, I did notice that positive reviews for certain products had the same wording.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who still believed those “likes” and star ratings on social media. There are many other people out there who continue to rely on those ratings for a wide range of goods and services being sold or advertised online.

Ratings and reviews are used even in job-hunting. And unfortunately, even young digital natives continue to be lured through online recruitment and human trafficking schemes to work in illegal cryptocurrency and offshore gaming scam operations overseas.

Apart from human traffickers, financial scammers abound. There are millions of Filipinos out there with e-wallets, and with bank accounts through which state ayuda is coursed, who have near-zero awareness of digital security.

SIM registration addresses only a small aspect of the problem. Sadly, digital tracing capability in our country is so laughable that scammers are even calling bank clients to claim that their accounts have been hacked, and trying in the process to obtain personal information.

This can be gleaned from an alert that I received this week by Viber from a major bank. It has set up a hotline for reporting such fake bank calls.

At least the private banks seem to be more pro-active than the government in efforts to foil hacking and digital scams. This is probably because the private banks have enormous resources for this, with the funds not getting diverted to politicians’ secret personal purposes.

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Even private financial institutions, however, are wanting in reliable identity verification. As I have written, there has been no progress on the complaint that I filed with the Manila Police District’s Anti-Cybercrime Group for a scam in which the payment was coursed through GCash. Maybe the amount involved is too small for the police. Maybe I should turn to the National Bureau of Investigation for help.

Shouldn’t e-wallet providers be held responsible for authentication of the identities of their account holders? Failing to do so, shouldn’t they have some accountability for fraudulent transactions conducted using their apps?

Besides unending digital scams, every week it seems that another government agency is hit by hackers. And their efforts to downplay the attacks ring hollow. The extent of the Medusa ransomware attack on the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. seems to get worse with each update given by PhilHealth officials.

The National Privacy Commission (NPC) at least has called out PhilHealth for possible negligence, in failing to renew its anti-virus software contract. A cyber expert said this typically costs about P10 million a year. Surely PhilHealth has that kind of money.

The House of Representatives, after reassuring the public that its data is safe following the defacement of its website by hackers, had to voluntarily take it down again amid what looked like another hacking attempt. The Senate, meanwhile, reported a spike in attempts to break into its system.

Maybe the hackers are just looking for details on how lawmakers spend their extraordinary and miscellaneous allocations. (Definitely not on protecting their system from cyber attack.) That kind of information could be worth more than the $300,000 ransom demanded by the Medusa hackers from PhilHealth. And there could be lawmakers ready and willing to pay – with our tax money.

Following the multiple attacks, the NPC has partnered with the Department of Information and Communications Technology for a better response. How much improvement is possible remains to be seen. The DICT is underfunded and acutely undermanned for cybersecurity purposes. Its cyber emergency response team consists of just 30 people, all on job order status.

Other government agencies may not even have personnel assigned to protect public data – or even an awareness of the critical need for such highly skilled workers.

Until the government and much of the private sector develop the proper mindset, victims of hacking and digital scams may just have to simply grin and bear it.