Police recover $2m lost in scams involving OCBC

The police have frozen 121 local bank accounts and recovered about $2 million lost by victims in phishing scams targeting OCBC Bank customers as at Sunday, said Minister of State for Home Affairs Desmond Tan.

Providing an update on the ongoing probe into the scams that took place last December, Mr Tan also said that about $2.2 million of victims' funds have been traced to 89 overseas bank accounts.

A total of 790 people fell prey, with losses tallied at $13.7 million.

"Many of the scam websites used in the phishing scams were hosted by Web hosting companies based overseas," said Mr Tan, who chairs the Inter-Ministry Committee on Scams (IMCS) set up in April 2020.

At least 107 local and 171 overseas Internet Protocol (IP) addresses were linked to the unauthorised access of the victims' Internet banking accounts.

He was replying to Dr Tan Wu Meng (Jurong GRC), Mr Sitoh Yih Pin (Potong Pasir) and Mr Dennis Tan (Hougang), who asked for an update in Parliament on the ongoing investigations.

The police have started investigations into the local IP addresses linked to the scams and the owners of the local money mule accounts.

They are also working with Interpol and foreign law enforcement agencies to probe the beneficiaries of the funds transferred overseas and the hosts of the scam websites.

Mr Desmond Tan could not divulge more as investigations are ongoing. But he noted that OCBC customers fell prey amid a sharp increase in the number of scams reported in Singapore.

Phishing scams involving impersonation of banks in Singapore via SMS have spiked, from 149 cases in 2020 to 1,021 last year. Overall, there were 23,931 scam cases reported last year, of which 5,020 were phishing scam cases.

Mr Tan said: "The use of a combination of highly orchestrated tactics, involving spoofed SMSes appearing in the same thread as genuine messages from the bank and links directing victims to a scam website, as well as the large number of customers targeted in the OCBC scams, shows that now the threat is significantly heightened."

He also said that people aged between 20 and 39 formed the largest group of victims of phishing scams and those related to jobs, e-commerce, investments, loans, China official impersonation and fake gambling platforms.

The largest group of victims of social media impersonation scams and those involving Internet love and fake friend calls were those aged between 40 and 59.

Responding to a question from Associate Professor Jamus Lim (Sengkang GRC) about unauthorised transactions made on credit cards in the past year, Mr Tan said card fraud cases reported by major credit card issuers here to the Monetary Authority of Singapore made up less than 0.1 per cent of total credit card transactions.

He said the police are extremely stretched, with officers trying to cope with increasing workloads and expectations without a proportionate increase in manpower.

He emphasised that recovery of money lost to scams is difficult, adding that where such sums have been recovered by the police, it involved the help of financial institutions.

Mr Tan noted that the police will be forming an Anti-Scam Command this year to consolidate expertise in scams across all police units, thereby improving coordination of anti-scam enforcement and investigations.

The police use technology to automate manual work processes in their fight against scams, including the generation of electronic production orders to banks for the freezing of bank accounts associated with scams.

Mr Tan said they are also using technology, such as the ScamShield app, to crowdsource information on scam calls and SMSes.

He added that ScamShield has been downloaded about 257,000 times. About 3.7 million SMSes and calls have been identified as potential scams through the app, while about 15,500 phone numbers have been blocked.

"ScamShield picked up and filtered about 2,000 scam messages used in the OCBC phishing scams," said Mr Tan. "Unfortunately, a lot more scam messages managed to reach the SMS inboxes of ScamShield users, mainly because they appeared in the same thread as legitimate messages."

He said this gap will be plugged to counter spoofed SMSes.

While ScamShield is currently available only for iOS devices, Mr Tan said the release of an Android version is planned for the next few months.

The IMCS will step up public education efforts on scams. It has started working with the Agency for Integrated Care, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Manpower and MoneySense to educate seniors, students, migrant workers and professionals about scams.