PSA: S’pore Police Warns Of New Kind Of Scam Targeting Bank Accounts; $65K Has Been Lost

Scammers have been stepping up from the old, predictable ways.

They’re coming up with new methods to impersonate reputable organisations to fool you into letting your guard down.

Just last week, the Singapore Police Force (SPF) were warning people of scammers pretending to be representatives of the Changi Airport Group for lucky draw scams, which has cost victims more than $40,000.

“Hey, you’ve won the chance to be scammed by us our lucky draw! Now just give us your bank details!”

Now, over $65,000 has been lost, this time to a bank scam.

Blocked/Deactivated Accounts?

This new scum scam tactic involves sending our text messages to bank customers, informing them that their ATM cards have been blocked/suspended/deactivated/etc.

And apparently, you have to “update” and “activate” by calling them.

A typical message goes “Dear Customer, Your ATM Card Temporarily Has Been BLOCKED. Because Still You Did not Update According NEW Rules if You want to activate Please call US”.

These scummers scammers will then impersonate professional bank staff and request for your personal particulars, i-Banking details, One-Time passwords (OTP), etc.

Of course, soon after, the victims will discover that unauthorised bank transactions have been made and money were lost.

As of November 2019, there have been 12 reports of losses, amounting to over $65,000.

SPF Issues Scam Alert

In order to increase awareness and prevention, SPF has issued a scam alert across the media to warn people of this new circulating scam.

Preventive measures include:

• Beware of unsolicited messages or calls from persons impersonating as staff from banks.  Scammers may use Caller ID spoofing technology to mask their actual phone number and display the bank’s number.
• Do not disclose your internet banking details such as account username, Personal Identification Number (PIN) or One-Time Password (OTP) to anyone through phone, email or SMS.
• Do not respond to digital token authentication requests via phone calls if you did not initiate any internet banking transaction. Do not authorise any suspicious authentication request.
• If you receive a suspicious call purportedly from your bank, hang up and call the hotline published on the bank’s website to verify the authenticity of the request. Do not call the number provided by the caller.

Also, if the message you receive is in such horrible English (unlikely Goody Feed’s) on top of inconsistent capitalisation and punctuation, it’s most likely a fake.

But if you think yourself a likely victim of such scums scams, you can register here on Scam Alert to receive the latest scam news.

Meanwhile, you can read up on different phone scams here and if you manage to identify a scammer when they call you, why not have some fun with them?