10 organisations receive inaugural crime prevention awards for efforts to keep Singapore safe
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UOB Tiong Bahru deputy branch manager Jessica Lee (left) and Ms Azlinah Amin, service manager of UOB’s main branch at Raffles Place, with the bank's champion award on Oct 7.
ST PHOTO: BRIAN TEO
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SINGAPORE – Ms Azlinah Amin, service manager of UOB’s main branch in Raffles Place, was on duty during the height of the gold buy rush in April when an elderly man walked in.
He asked if he could buy gold from the branch, but Ms Azlinah, 54, noticed that he was constantly checking his phone and texting.
The man wanted to buy $700,000 worth of gold to hand over to someone he had never met, but, with her patience and persistence, Ms Azlinah saved him from losing all his savings to a scam syndicate.
On Oct 7, the National Crime Prevention Council held its first Crime Prevention Awards at its annual appreciation dinner at the Singapore Marriott Tang Plaza Hotel to recognise organisations which helped prevent crime.
Minister of State for Home Affairs Goh Pei Ming, who is also Minister of State for Social and Family Development, attended the ceremony, where 10 organisations were given awards for their crime-fighting contributions.
They were Marina Bay Sands, Meta, Motorola Solutions, UOB, OCBC Bank, Courts, Sheng Siong, Shopee, Singapore Pools and TikTok.
Said Mr Goh: “It’s encouraging to see more and more companies stepping forward and jointly working together to be able to tackle this collective challenge that we face – online scams.”
UOB’s Ms Azlinah talked to the media on Oct 7 about her encounter with the man, who wanted to buy gold from her branch and hand it to a stranger.
After much probing, he admitted that someone who claimed to be from an independent investment firm had contacted him to ask him to buy gold for better investment returns.
He said he was later connected to an “official” from the Monetary Authority of Singapore and was told to buy 5kg of gold to hand over to the official.
Hearing that, Ms Azlinah determined that he was being duped by scammers into buying 5kg of gold worth $700,000 for a fake investment.
She then locked the man’s account. She said she had to calm the stunned man down after he started to blame himself for falling for the scam.
In another case, UOB’s Tiong Bahru deputy branch manager, Ms Jessica Lee, 54, attended to a customer in her late 50s who looked anxious and evasive one Friday in April.
The woman requested a premature withdrawal of her fixed deposit of more than $15,000. She got angry when Ms Lee asked why she wanted to do this and insisted on making the cash withdrawal.
But the bank halted the cash withdrawal when the Singapore Police Force’s Anti-Scam Command confirmed that the woman had fallen victim to a government official impersonation scam.
Said Ms Lee: “I feel happy for her because we managed to prevent this money from being lost. She actually shared with me that this is all her hard-earned money because she was working as a dishwasher and the $15,000 was her life savings.”
With victims in Singapore losing a record $1.1 billion to scams in 2024
Come Oct 15, most major retail banks in Singapore will put in place safeguards on all digital transactions
The banks – DBS Bank, OCBC, UOB, Citibank, HSBC, Maybank and Standard Chartered Bank – will hold transactions that result in more than half of an account’s balance being transferred out for up to 24 hours.
The safeguard will apply to all digital banking transactions done via bank apps and internet banking.
Nearly $500 million in Singapore was lost to scams
