The Philippines was also a fraud hub. By 2019, it was the global leader of online attacks,20 both automated and human, followed distantly by the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Indonesia. A report at the time pointed to three reasons: “sophisticated tools, cheap manual labor, and good economic incentives associated with online fraud.” (Forty-three percent were human, i.e., not bots.) The Philippines also has a higher-than-average number of unlicensed software installations,21 often seeding malware into PCs to turn them into botnet platforms for automated attacks.
