GASA Survey Finds Most Filipino Scam Victims Never Report It

According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, a new study of 1,160 Filipino adults has measured something most scam coverage never captures: the gap between feeling safe and actually being safe. The study counted exposure, confidence, contact, loss, and reporting, and lined them up against each other.

The numbers move in the wrong direction. Scam exposure rose to 84% this year, up from 77% in 2025. Confidence stayed high: 58% of people said they could recognise a scam. But confidence did not stop contact. Of those exposed, 60% went on to interact with a scammer anyway. And interaction did not stay harmless: 15% lost money or personal information as a result.

The last figure is the one that matters most for what happens after a scam succeeds. Only 4% of those affected reported it to the authorities.

What the sequence shows

Each stage in this chain loses people slower than the one before it, except the last. Exposure to confidence barely moves. Confidence to contact barely holds. But contact to loss, and loss to reporting, are where the real damage sits. Most people who get scammed do not tell anyone who could act on it. That means the 15% loss figure is almost certainly an undercount of what regulators and banks can see in their own data, because so little of it ever reaches them through a formal report.

This is useful precisely because it is not another breakdown of a single scam script. It is a measurement of the whole system: how many people get approached, how many of those think they are safe, how many act on that confidence anyway, and how many of the people who lose money ever tell someone with the power to do something about it.

The Global Anti-Scam Alliance publishing this work matters because it gives banks, regulators and platforms in the Philippines a baseline they did not have before. Confidence in spotting scams is not the same thing as resistance to them. A country can have both rising awareness campaigns and rising losses at the same time, and this study is evidence that is exactly what is happening.

For anyone reading this in the Philippines, the practical takeaway sits in that last number. Reporting a scam, even a small one, even one where no money was lost, is what turns an individual experience into data someone can act on. Four in a hundred people currently do that. The study does not say why the other ninety-six do not, only that they don't.