Team Cow

Inspiration

Given the recent spate of scams in Singapore, we felt like something could be done to protect people from being scammed, especially the elderly. This is because existing scam prevention measures are difficult to use, e.g. scamalert.sg which has a cluttered and complicated interface.

What it does

Scam Detector (inspired by DownDetector) is a simplified web application to help the elderly report and identify potential scams.

Features:

Users can report malicious phone numbers or websites and provide their description of the modus operandi of said scams
Users can also search for suspicious phone numbers or websites to check for matching submissions and other users' stories
Database was populated with data scraped from scamalert.sg, which was cleaned, simplified and tagged for easy user reference.
Search bar also provides a frequency score to reflect the likelihood of a scam being real (based on the number of reports and searches)

How we built it

Frontend: ReactJS Backend: Firebase Cloud Firestore Web scraping API: Scrapi

Challenges we ran into

Scammers may utilize spoofed numbers, which is a huge oversight and workaround to our efforts in recording these numbers. These spoofed numbers could potentially be an individual's real phone number, which may present greater security risks to said individual.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first time using web scraping, and we are quite satisfied with the results :D

What we learned

Scammers can target their victims through many mediums, such as calls, text messages, emails, and fake websites. The largest at-risk group are the elderly which are more gullible to falling to these scams. While the elderly are not so tech-savvy, we've tried to make our web application as elderly friendly and simple for them.