FROM THE INDUSTRY
You mention that anti-fraud and cybersecurity are major focuses for MEF. What’s happening there? Unfortunately, cyber fraud and cybersecurity have become inherently part of everything we do. Just yesterday, Orange in Belgium had a massive cyber attack. France had one a few months ago. These aren’t small incidents. Look at South Korea – SK Telecom, one of the most advanced telecoms in the world, had their security compromised. They lost so many customers and had to reissue SIMs for practically all of them. When your identity and everything you do on a mobile phone is compromised, you’re compromising your banking, healthcare, everything. A pretty terrifying scenario. What can be done? The challenge is the complexity of the telecom value chain. It’s not just telecoms offering services to customers – it’s telecoms plus banks plus intermediaries plus somebody else. Security breaches can happen through third-party suppliers. Vodafone Germany were fined 45 million euros for GDPR compliance issues, not of themselves, but of another channel reseller in their infrastructure. Even if it’s your supplier, you’re still responsible. You’re the data owner. You’re hosting an anti-fraud event. Tell me about that. It’s our third year running this conference. What makes it unique is we bring together enforcement, regulation, and legislation in one room. We have Europol, BEREC, Ofcom, the chair of the House of Commons Select Committee for Innovation, Technology and Science. Then
we add telecoms – Google, Barclays, LSE, Proximus, GSMA, Telefonica, Virgin Media.
We want them all talking to each other because these people need to share information. The conversation needs to be about how we lift the level of security in the industry and respond to AI – both the bad AI and the good AI that can fight it. Let’s talk about consumer- facing fraud. What should people be worried about? Smishing is a huge trend – that’s phishing via SMS. Because one-time passwords are largely sent via SMS, that’s where criminals have moved. But it’s evolved into a sophisticated multi-channel approach. They’ll orchestrate a call followed by an SMS, creating urgency. They might tell you there’s been an attack, or you’ve paid a large amount to someone that wasn’t real, or your family needs help. It makes us react instinctively rather than rationally. People lose their life savings this way. This is happening everywhere globally – it feeds on our humanity and uses technologies we now use so frequently. Phone theft is changing too. Massively. Criminals aren’t stealing your phone anymore – they’re stealing your wallet. And it’s more valuable than ever. They particularly like to steal phones while you’re talking because your phone is active. If you’re talking and they grab it, they’ve got 45-50 minutes before it locks to use it for payments. Think about what’s on your phone. You’ve probably got photos of your passport, payment cards, personal information. If criminals are really lucky, they might find banking passwords or access to additional services. Plus, they’ve got a phone to resell to the second-hand market – organised crime has become great at reselling second-hand phones.
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DECEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.4
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