CICC scales national scam reporting 838.6% in a single quarter with a Proto AI agent

Scam education and the Scam Ba Yan? campaign

CICC’s Scam Ba Yan? initiative is designed to build public awareness of active scam tactics, with citizens encouraged to ask directly: “Is that a scam?” The campaign generates a sustained flow of inbound queries from Filipinos wanting to verify suspicious calls, messages, links, and payment requests before acting on them.

CICCAI handles these enquiries across CICC’s digital channels – answering questions about known scam methods, flagging common attack vectors, and guiding citizens on what to do if they believe they have been targeted. The AI agent operates in Filipino, Tagalog, and English, 24 hours a day, ensuring that every citizen who reaches out during the campaign receives an immediate, substantive response rather than a waiting queue.

Scam report intake through the 1326 hotline

1326 is the National Anti-Scam Hotline. Before the AI agent, citizens calling or messaging 1326 entered a manual process: complaint details had to be captured by a human agent, categorised by complaint type, and routed to the responsible team or partner agency. The process was slow, constrained by staffing hours, and difficult to scale as inbound volumes increased.

CICCAI now handles the first stage of every 1326 interaction digitally. When a citizen contacts CICC to file a complaint, the AI agent opens a structured intake flow – collecting the nature of the incident, the channel through which the scam was received, relevant identifying details, and any evidence the citizen can provide. The complaint is categorised automatically and routed to the responsible team.

Cross-agency referral across the anti-scam ecosystem

Many scam complaints filed with CICC involve financial fraud that falls within the jurisdiction of other agencies – the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) for banking and payment fraud, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for investment scams, or the Insurance Commission (IC) for fraudulent insurance products. Before the deployment, a citizen who filed a complaint with the wrong agency or needed to involve multiple agencies had to repeat their report separately at each institution.

Both BSP and SEC were already live on Proto’s platform through earlier deployments. The CICC deployment connects CICCAI to this existing network, enabling automated handoff of reports between agencies. A citizen’s scam complaint can be classified, and the relevant regulatory body identified, within the same conversation – without requiring the citizen to navigate the government’s institutional structure themselves.

CICC Acting Executive Director Rojun Hosillos said: “Our partnership with Proto reinforces the government’s vision of a safer digital Philippines. By integrating Proto’s technology into 1326, we can process citizen reports faster, coordinate with law-enforcement agencies more efficiently, and ultimately recover more funds lost to scams. This system strengthens the backbone of national digital trust – empowering every Filipino to report fraud in real time and see that action is taken.”

From launch to rapid scale

The interaction data in the first two quarters of operation reflects how quickly the AI agent was adopted by citizens using CICC’s channels – growing from 2,021 interactions in the first quarter live to 18,968 in the following quarter, an 838.6% increase quarter-on-quarter.

CICC sits within a growing network of Philippine government agencies deployed on Proto’s shared service platform – alongside the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Insurance Commission – forming the backbone of the country’s national anti-scam infrastructure.

Proto CEO Curtis Matlock said: “The Philippines is setting a global example for coordinated anti-scam governance. By linking advanced AI systems with proactive legislation and citizen-facing tools managed by the CICC, the country is building not just a hotline – but a living, intelligent infrastructure for public trust in the digital economy.”

Gates Foundation Senior Programme Officer Jeremiah Grossman said: “The foundation is investing in consumer protection AI tools with the goal of building trust in digital services for the lowest-income communities. Through these projects, we hope to demonstrate the value of an automated grievance redress system for citizens, regulators, and governments – and catalyse broader adoption across emerging markets.”