News
Global Anti-Scam Alliance told a Mexico City workshop that scams unfold through data misuse and manipulation long before any payment occurs.
Reported by
Global Anti-Scam AllianceA scam does not begin when someone sends money. According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, that transfer is one step in a much longer chain, and treating it as the whole event is why so many warnings arrive too late to matter.
The workshop, held in Mexico City on 27 August 2026 with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and Tec-Check, brought together journalists and editors from 16 media outlets, including UnoTV, Excélsior, El Economista, El Financiero, El País, Milenio and Reforma. The session set out to examine how news coverage shapes whether people recognise a scam before it costs them anything.
Sissi de la Peña, Director of the GASA Mexico Chapter, laid out the sequence a scam actually follows. It starts with the acquisition and use of personal data. That data is used to profile a potential victim. Then comes initial contact, followed by impersonation and emotional manipulation. Payment comes near the end, not the start. After payment, funds move on again, through bank accounts, mule accounts, other payment methods, or virtual assets.
This sequence matters because it separates two things people often treat as one. A scam is the deception and manipulation itself. Financial fraud is what happens if that deception leads to an actual economic loss. The scam can be running for days before any fraud occurs.
Cybersecurity tools guard systems, networks and accounts. Most scams do not touch any of that. Instead, the fraudster persuades a person to hand over information, approve a transaction, or act under pressure, without ever breaching a system. The manipulation does the work a hack would otherwise have to do.
Víctor Merchand of UNODC Mexico broke the process into four stages: approach, deception, transaction, and post-fraud. Each stage offers a different opening. Before the transaction, a person can still question a request, verify who is asking, or simply stop responding.
The State of Scams in Mexico 2025 Report put losses in Mexico at MXN 139 billion, with each person exposed to an average of 86 scam attempts a year. Eighty-six attempts a year means contact with a scam is not a rare event for most people; it is closer to a background condition of using a phone or a bank account at all.
That reframes where the useful moment sits. If a scam depends on manipulation rather than a technical breach, the intervention that stops it is not a firewall or a password change. It is the pause before the payment, when a request can still be questioned, a caller's identity checked, or a transaction simply not authorised. The sequence GASA Mexico laid out shows that every stage before payment is still deception alone, which means every stage before payment is still a stage where nothing has been lost yet.
