The face of crime has changed.  The modern digital age has brought with it much good, but - as with anything - there are negative consequences as well.

One of those is a change in the type of crime that people can be subject to. Nowadays, opportunistic criminals need not linger around crowded places to try and nab a wallet or a purse, but they can instead resort to other, more digital and therefore more widespread means of trying to make financial gain of unassuming victims.

Everyone has, at some point or another, likely received a suspicious email or suspicious SMS message of someone trying to impersonate a person or a service, such as a bank.  Banks themselves frequently issue warnings for people to be careful against such scams.

Yet these scams, and their victims, are on the up.

The Office of the Arbiter for Financial Services issued its annual report last week, and that report reads that there has been a significant increase in these scams and that they have become distinctly more complex and hence, more convincing.

According to the report, these mainly involved two types of scams: fraudulent payment requests sent through fake bank messages, and so-called "pig butchering" scams, where victims are manipulated over extended periods into transferring large sums of money.

Many of the victims to these scams are among the elderly, who may be less technologically literate and hence less capable of spotting a scam, and who may also less wary of how nowadays almost everything has to be questioned.

For instance, the report highlights the case of a 72-year-old pensioner who lost €27,300 to a crypto scam, and another of a semi-retired airline training captain who lost more than €713,000 because scammers used a fake trading platform to persuade him to transfer the funds and took advantage of his emotional state after the death of his father-in-law.

These are significant amounts of money, and in many cases there is very, very little chance of ever getting it back.

In response to the growing number of such cases, the Office of the Arbiter for Financial Services said that it had issued a technical note in February 2025 outlining how complaints relating to pig butchering scams should be assessed and identifying areas where financial service providers could improve their practices.

The Office said it is also working with the police and Malta's financial regulator on a national awareness campaign against payment fraud, scheduled to launch in 2026.

This is a good step forward, and it is important that this is something that is communicated across a multitude of platforms, not just online, so that it can be seen by as many people as possible.

Fighting these scams has become all the more important, as law enforcement have found themselves on the front lines of having to deal with them.  We've seen many cases end up in court, which is a good start, but prevention is always better than cure - and the more trauma and financial loss that can be prevented for innocent, and sometimes vulnerable, people, the better.