Sixty-five percent of the cellphone numbers being used in Taiwan have been hacked and put on sale, the second highest in Asia, according to an annual fraud report released Monday by Gogolook, the Taiwan-based developer of call-filtering app Whoscall.

Gogolook published the personal data breaches section of the 2022 Annual Fraud Report which was based on investigations into personal data leaks in the Asian market and aimed at giving people a glimpse into upstream fraud models.

Those investigations were conducted by Gogolook in collaboration with Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau and Constella Intelligence, an international digital risk protection service provider.

The investigations found that Malaysia was the Asian country most affected by mobile phone number leaks, with 73 percent of the total phone numbers in use leaked, ahead of Taiwan 65 percent, while the figure was 56 percent in Japan.

Taiwan has about 16 million people aged 20-65 and it is estimated that the cellphone numbers of about 10.4 million were leaked and put on sale, the report said, citing official data.

The top three types of personal data stolen in Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia were the same: passwords, phone numbers and names in descending order, the report showed.

However, in Japan and South Korea, the three most common types of personal data breaches are names, passwords and phone numbers in that order.

Other common types of stolen data include nationalities, email accounts, addresses and birth dates, according to the report.

Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel