National Anti-Scam Centres: A Unified Response

Fraudsters are not bound by legality, scope, board meetings, or regulatory cycles. They brute force every option until they find a gap they can exploit before going all in.

These gaps are the difference between stolen funds and a protected customer.

Most institutions nowadays are fragmented in their fraud response. The level of coordination is asymmetrical at best, and disjointed at worst.

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PwC and GASA's Findings

PwC and GASA recently published a report highlighting the immense fraud losses that occurred recently. US$1 trillion were lost to scams globally in 2024. This number is expected to rise in the coming decade as AI tools, fringe technologies and new exploits are utilised to their full potential by criminals.

In their report, they proposed a solution, a growing movement that is taking root in a number of countries: national anti-scam centres.

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Siloes: The Modern Fraud Prevention Dilemma

When departments operate separately, sequentially, and without clear coordination, several things happen. Initiatives overlap, causing redundancy in approaches, processes and response.

Fragmentation also produces siloes where disjointed sectors are unable to pool intelligence appropriately to form the necessary response in the face of a fraud attack.

Take the standard we see today. AML, KYC, fraud, cybersecurity, law enforcement and central regulators are all doing their own thing. When a suspicious transaction occurs, there is no coordination and response is delayed. When a customer reports losses, that information often fades into noise among the many channels. When obvious fraud patterns emerge, such as strange IP addresses, spoofed devices, network tampering and anomalous behaviour, these systems each receive a piece of the puzzle.

By the time the whole picture is assembled, it is already too late.

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Enter The National Fraud Response

A growing number of governing bodies are establishing national anti-scam centres: Singapore, Taiwan, Canada and Australia. All of them are proving effective to the highest degree.

PwC and GASA have stated in their findings that national anti-scam centres are able to circumvent the fragmented responses we have today.

Rather than operating as a separate node in the larger ecosystem, these centres connect various sectors involved in the transaction journey into a unified network. The level of coordination is unparalleled compared to a singular entity tackling fraud on its own.

The central hub of the anti-fraud network receives intelligence as soon as a node reports it, and redistributes that data system-wide. The entire system gets the pieces of information in real time and is able to respond immediately as one.

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Coordinated Efforts

A national level fraud response allows for swift action upon fraudsters and immediate support for victims.

System level decisions reverberate across the network and are received by operators simultaneously. Intelligence is shared, data is pooled and analysed, and everyone gets the full picture rather than a summarised finding.

Deduplication of efforts and centralised policies and standards remove another persistent problem. In disparate systems, repeated actions occur sequentially rather than in parallel, wasting time that fraudsters use to their advantage.

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Victim Support

In fragmented systems, victims are routinely overlooked. Reporting channels are confusing and debilitating. Their pleas for help are drowned in a sea of noise.

A national anti-scam centre centralises reporting channels alongside intelligence and response. A victim reports once. That case is distributed and shared among all parties in the network automatically.

These efforts build public confidence and drive higher reporting rates. The insights gathered from a higher volume of reporting are standardised, providing a clearer, sharper view of each incident. A central point of collaboration also allows public awareness campaigns greater reach through every channel and node in the network.

Centralised fraud response on a national level compounds its benefits over time. More reporting leads to better insights. Better insights lead to sharper awareness. Sharper awareness leads to fewer victims. The cycle reinforces itself.

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How We’re Setting Up the Pieces

At Level Five, we are actively building the infrastructure that will form the foundation of tomorrow's coordinated fraud defence networks.

That means assembling industries into fraud consortiums and equipping financial institutions with the technology required to make coordination actionable rather than aspirational.

The capabilities we are deploying:

• Unified Workflows for Fraud and AML: Breaking down the operational barriers between departments that have historically worked in isolation, treating the same threat from different angles with no shared picture.
• Continuous Journey Tracking: Detection that spans the entire transaction journey rather than firing at isolated endpoints, closing the gaps that fragmented monitoring leaves open.
• Behaviour and Device Profiling: Identifying bad actors from both a technical and behavioural angle before they reach critical points in the transaction chain.
• Open Port Cloaking: Shutting down the primary vectors fraudsters use to harvest data, manipulate accounts, and launch infrastructure attacks.

Our base of operations sits in the heart of Southeast Asia, in close proximity to some of the most sophisticated transnational financial crime syndicates operating today. 

That proximity sharpens our understanding of how these networks operate, how they adapt, and what it actually takes to stay ahead of them. We will continue to equip the institutions on the front lines with the tools and intelligence needed to build the alliances of tomorrow.

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