As Cybersecurity Awareness Month comes to an end, we're concentrating on mobile scams, one of the most prevalent digital threats of our day. Over $400 billion in funds have been stolen globally in the past 12 months as a result of fraudsters using sophisticated AI tools to create more convincing schemes.
Google study about smartphone threat protection
Android has been at the forefront of the fight against scammers for years, utilizing the best AI to create proactive, multi-layered defenses that can detect and stop scams before they get to you. Every month, over 10 billion suspected malicious calls and messages are blocked by Android's scam defenses. In order to preserve the integrity of the RCS service, Google claims to conduct regular safety checks. It has blocked more than 100 million suspicious numbers in the last month alone.
About the research
To highlight how fraud defenses function in the real world, Google invited consumers and independent security experts to compare how well Android and iOS protect you from these dangers. Additionally, Google is releasing a new report that describes how contemporary text scams are planned, giving you insight into the strategies used by scammers and how to identify them.
Key insights
- Those who reported not receiving any scam texts in the week before the survey were 58% more likely to be Android users than iOS users. The benefit was even greater on Pixel, where users were 96% more likely to report no scam texts than iPhone owners.
- Whereas, reports of three or more scam texts in a week were 65% more common among iOS users than Android users. When comparing iPhone and Pixel, the disparity was even more noticeable, with 136% more iPhone users reporting receiving a high volume of scam messages.
- Compared to iPhone users, Android users were 20% more likely to say their device's scam protections were "very effective" or "extremely effective." Additionally, iPhone users were 150% more likely to say their device was completely ineffective at preventing mobile fraud.
Android smartphones were found to have the strongest AI-powered protections in a recent assessment conducted by the international technology market research firm Counterpoint Research.
