Singapore
SINGAPORE — Scams continued to drive an increase in overall crime in the first half of the year, with S$227.8 million lost to the top 10 scam types, which is an increase of about 60 per cent in value from the same period last year.
SINGAPORE — Scams continued to drive an increase in overall crime in the first half of the year, with S$227.8 million lost to the top 10 scam types, which is an increase of about 60 per cent in value from the same period last year.
The biggest jump in scams involved job scams, where the victims were enticed by fake offers of lucrative employment, often supposedly to be done from home. These scams soared seven-fold in the first half of this year.
In all, 25,593 crime cases were reported from January to June this year, up from 18,725 cases in the first half of last year, police crime data released on Monday (Aug 29) showed.
More than half of the crimes reported during the first half of this year involved scams, and scams made up about 56 per cent of all crimes reported. In the same period last year, that figure was about 41 per cent.
“Scammers have been constantly evolving their tactics, facilitated by the increase in online activities,” the police said in a statement.
“Job scams, phishing scams, e-commerce scams and investment scams remain of particular concern.”
The police’s mid-year crime statistics also showed that there were 9,825 reported cases of physical crimes in the first half this year, up slightly from 9,748 in the same period last year.
The number of physical crimes, which comprises all crimes excluding scams and cyber crimes, was still lower than the pre-Covid-19 figure of 13,015 reported in the first half of 2019, the police noted.
Voyeurism cases fell to 216 cases in the first half of this year, down from 236 in the same period last year, which the police partly attributed to public education efforts on crime awareness.
Still, cases of molestation rose to 773, up from 739 last year.
Housebreaking and related crimes fell to 77 cases, from 88 in the same period last year. Robbery cases fell to seven cases from 16 last year.
This was the lowest number of cases of housebreaking and robbery in the past 10 years, the police said.
The number of scam cases reported rose to 14,349 in the first half of this year, up from 7,746 in the same period last year.
The S$227.8 million that was cheated from victims was sharply higher than the S$142.5 million in the same period last year.
Four types of scams — namely jobs, phishing, e-commerce and investment scams — made up 74.5 per cent of the top 10 most prevalent scam types reported in the first half of 2022.
Here is a breakdown of the most prevalent scams along with other types of crimes that the police highlighted in their report.
One victim lost S$12 million to an investment scam, the largest sum cheated in a single scam in the statistics covering the first half of this year.
The police told TODAY that the victim, whom they did not name, was added into a WhatsApp chat group in mid-2021 so that she may get messages about buying stocks.
She responded to one of the messages and was redirected to a scammer who instructed her on WhatApp to buy S$12 million worth of shares.
A few months after buying the stocks, she realised that the stocks were suspended and was unable to retrieve her money, the police said. The reason for the stock’s suspension was not immediately clear.
In a separate case, John (not his real name) told reporters of how he was fooled into believing that he was being investigated for money laundering and — after submitting bank and identification details for “investigations” — led to his bank account being drained.
John is a mid-level skilled worker in his 50s holding a job in the banking industry. He holds a work pass and has lived in Singapore for 16 years.
In June this year, he got a call from a scammer pretending to be an official from the State Courts, telling him to attend a court hearing regarding financial crimes committed by a company set up in his name.
The call was later transferred to another scammer claiming to be a police officer, who made John send over his internet banking credentials and credit card numbers.
The scammer told him not to speak to anybody while the investigation was happening and threatened him with jail if he did not cooperate.
John said that he complied because he felt indignant for being wrongly accused of a crime he did not commit and wanted his name cleared as soon as possible.
“Within a couple of minutes of our conversation, the ‘police officer’ sent me a PDF file of this court document. It was very convincing and an elaborate set-up,” John said.
“I didn’t have time to think. It just went from one step to the next.”
Later, more than S$90,000 was transferred out of John’s bank account and the scammer told John that if the bank asks, he should tell the bank that he was making an investment into a business venture.
The scammers then tried to make more transfers but a bank staff member from DBS bank detected the fraudulent transaction and alerted the police’s Anti-Scam Centre.
The Anti-Scam Centre contacted John about the scam and through a prolonged conversation, managed to convince John after sending him a news article describing the playbook of such scams.
The police said that the centre eventually managed to trace the transactions and fully recovered the more than S$1.1 million that was at risk of being fraudulently transferred out of John’s bank account.
“I just felt really stupid,” John said. “’Stupid’ is probably the right word.”
John said that if he had paid more attention to the bank and police advisories about scams, he would have seen that they were a “carbon copy” of the playbook used by the scammers against him.
“What I’ve learnt is that, apart from the obvious… is that if I get a call from a number beginning with ‘+65’, I’ll simply ignore it.” ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY LORAINE LEE
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