momo's customer list fed a fraud wave — 13 weeks atop Taiwan's 165 hotline chart

momo (Fubon Media Technology), part of Taiwan's Fubon group, is one of the island's largest e-commerce platforms. Beginning in the mid-2010s, waves of fraud targeted its shoppers with a method that only works with real order data: callers posed as momo customer service, recited the customer's recent purchase, and used the trust that bought to extract payment for a fictitious 'installment cancellation.'

The data's origin was reported as a suspected leak of member information; what was established was its effect. By the first half of 2020 the impersonation scheme had made momo a fixture of the Criminal Investigation Bureau's 165 anti-fraud hotline: from the start of the year to 21 June, 192 victims reported NT$28.24 million in losses, and from April momo sat atop the hotline's platform ranking for thirteen consecutive weeks.

The ranking turned a security matter into a brand one. The name momo on a caller ID had become a warning sign rather than a promise; the platform's strongest asset — a large, loyal, reachable customer base — was exactly what made its customers targetable. The press covering the statistics put it plainly: the platform had visibly failed to plug the hole.