Philippine Scam Report Shows Bank Transfers Falling, Wallets Rising

According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, a push by Philippine banks to cut off one route scammers use to move stolen money is working. The State of Scams Philippines 2026 Report, produced with Mastercard and Gogolook, found that scammers' use of bank account transfers to move illicit funds fell from 36% in 2025 to 12% in 2026. The Philippines was the only country in Southeast Asia to record a drop.

That fall lines up with two specific efforts: the implementation of AFASA and nationwide mule-account intelligence initiatives, which share information across banks about accounts used to launder scam proceeds. When banks can flag and close those accounts faster, scammers lose a channel they relied on.

What moved, and where it went

The report, based on a survey of 1,160 Filipino adults, shows the money did not stop moving, it moved somewhere else. Digital wallet abuse by scammers rose sharply in the same period, from 34% in 2025 to 73% in 2026. Scammers shifted to the channel banks had not yet closed off.

This is what the numbers show: closing one route does not reduce total fraud, it redirects it. The bank-transfer crackdown worked as a bank-transfer crackdown. It did not touch the digital wallet sector, so that sector absorbed the traffic. Anyone reading the 12% figure as a sign that scam losses are falling overall would be reading it wrong; the report itself says scam exposure is still rising, from 77% of adults encountering a scam attempt in 2025 to 84% in 2026, an average of 151 scams per adult per year.

Why this still counts as progress

A closed channel is still a closed channel. Mule accounts tied to bank transfers are harder for scammers to use now than they were a year ago, and that is a direct result of coordinated action between financial institutions and regulators. The report's recommendation, a National Anti-Scam Hub to enable cross-agency intelligence sharing and faster responses, is built on the logic of what already worked with bank transfers: shared data closes gaps faster than any single institution acting alone.

The gap the next phase has to close

Most scam contact now arrives through channels people already trust. Thirty-nine percent of scam attempts reached people through instant messaging apps, 36% through social media posts, and 88% overall happened on platforms with a direct-message function. Fifty-eight percent of adults say they are confident they can spot a scam, but 60% of those who encountered one went on to interact with it anyway. The bank-transfer fix shows that closing a specific channel works. The unresolved question is whether the same coordinated approach can be applied to digital wallets and messaging platforms before scammers settle in there too.