In Vietnam alone, where more than half the population shops online, the e-commerce industry is expected to grow 18% this year to $22 billion, according to research from RMIT University. This is the third fastest growth rate in the region after the Philippines (23%) and Thailand (19%).
However, along with this rapid growth, digital threats are also increasing. One of the prominent issues today is the unprecedented increase in cybercrime, which takes advantage of cyberspace, using high technology to defraud and appropriate the assets of network users.
According to statistics, in 2023, Vietnam will be among the top 10 cybercrime hotspots in the world. The total amount of money people were scammed online is about 8,000-10,000 billion VND, 1.5 times higher than in 2022.
The most common fraud methods today are: Fraudulent purchase and sale of cheap goods and services; impersonating relatives to text or call to request money transfers; fraud to standardize personal information; luring people to do online tasks; impersonating financial companies and banks to support lending...
From an expert perspective, Dr Joshua Dwight - lecturer at RMIT University and researcher specializing in digital fraud - said: "E-commerce is a popular target because it is easy to access but difficult to control, and this is a serious vulnerability in the region's digital ecosystem."
Cybercriminals use a variety of tricks to exploit e-commerce platforms. “They can create fake websites that look exactly like the real ones and still connect you to the real e-commerce site. The fake website not only forwards your information to the real shopping platform to complete legitimate transactions, but also secretly collects your data to commit future fraud,” Dr. Dwight explains.
In addition to using the above deceptive interfaces, bad guys can directly attack e-commerce platforms. They can launch denial-of-service attacks to “crash” the website or insert malicious code to exploit security vulnerabilities of the shopping platform.
In Vietnam, according to the weekly information security warning of the National Cyber Security Monitoring Center, the alarming reality is that the majority of phishing websites discovered every week are fake banking or e-commerce platforms.
Dr Dwight believes these may not be isolated incidents but rather the actions of systematic, technology-enabled criminal organisations.
To minimize this situation, according to experts, users must be very vigilant. At the same time, authorities need to strengthen regional cooperation and standardize protocols to respond to cybercrime.
