User cooperation, technological alerts
Gogolook thus rose from obscurity to popularity overnight and from bleak prospects to receiving an investment of NT$529 million from Naver (the parent company of the messaging app Line). Confidence in the company comes from the fact that it removes the uncertainty, unease, and information asymmetry of incoming phone calls and messages.
Marco Tsai notes: “Our database is at the core of our technology, and within this core telephone numbers are the main protective ‘moat.’ Gogolook currently has 2.6 billion phone numbers, and in recent years we have begun to extend our services to website domain names. This is the largest fraud prevention database in East Asia.” Information from users, who have become a collaborative community, accounts for some 20–30% of this data.
Gogolook’s main partner in Taiwan is the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the National Police Agency. Tsai mentions fraudulent phone calls received by consumers related to installment payments for online purchases as a case in point. Whoscall will indicate “this is a high-risk number” and remind users to be alert and to verify the identity of the caller before transferring money.
This is why the police tell elderly people who may be vulnerable to being swindled that they should “install Whoscall, because it can help you identify phone calls from scammers.”
Royal Thai Police also onboard
Police agencies in Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong have also recommended that their citizens use Whoscall.
Tsai points out that there was a massive increase in the number of fraud cases in Southeast Asia in 2020 to 2021, and local residents began widely using Whoscall’s services, with an explosion in recommendations.
Gogolook also works with the Royal Thai Police and the Thai National Cyber Security Agency. “The Thai police also recommend Whocall to citizens. For us, these are recommendations that money can’t buy,” says Tsai.
Gogolook’s services are available in nine markets including Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Brazil. Besides having the highest penetration of any anti-fraud app in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand, in 2024 the number of users in Thailand is projected to surpass that in Taiwan. In 2023 Gogolook became a founding member of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, an organization that forms a bridge between the anti-fraud industries of Asia and Europe.
In February 2024 Gogolook began working with StoreFront, a Japanese retail chain with more than 2,000 outlets, to link up with Gogolook’s phone number database and create local caller ID services.
Gogolook became the first Taiwanese software company to list on the Taiwan Innovation Board. Company staff marked the occasion with a group photo outside the Taiwan Stock Exchange.