The police have partnered more than 20 financial institutions that will move to freeze most bank accounts suspected to be linked to scammers within a day, in a bid to minimise losses to victims and tackle the ongoing scourge of scams.
The initiative - named Project Frontier, which stands for Funds Recovery Operations and Networks Team, Inspiring Effective Resolutions - has cut the time needed to freeze such bank accounts from the 14 to 60 working days previously, Minister of State for Home Affairs Desmond Tan said yesterday.
"I've asked banks if we can work together to further compress the turnaround time for the freezing of bank accounts used by scammers so that even less is lost to scams."
Speaking during the debate on his ministry's budget, Mr Tan added that the Association of Banks in Singapore and its members have also worked with the police and Monetary Authority of Singapore to detect and weed out scammers and money mules.
The inter-ministry committee on scams that Mr Tan chairs also works with telcos and the Infocomm Media Development Authority to block spoof calls and scam websites used by scammers abroad, he said.
It is also working with online platforms to tackle e-commerce scams, for instance, by possibly improving seller verification, he added.
This comes after a record number of scams was detected last year, climbing 65.1 per cent from 2019. The 15,756 reported cases of scams pushed the overall crime rate to its highest since 2009, according to figures released by the police last month.
If scams were excluded, the total number of crimes last year would have decreased by 15.3 per cent to 21,653, from 25,570 in 2019.
E-commerce scams, the most commonly reported type of scam last year, saw a 19.1 per cent jump to 3,354 reported cases compared with 2019.
Responding to Nominated MP Raj Joshua Thomas on security officers being subjected to verbal and physical abuse, Mr Tan said the Private Security Industry Act will be amended to include new offences to tackle the issue.
"These offences will also carry harsher punishments or penalties compared with similar offences against the general public," he said, adding that the ministry will continue supporting public education efforts like the industry-led anti-abuse campaign.
The Home Affairs Ministry will also work with the industry to equip security officers with better public management skills and encourage the use of body cameras to deter abuse, he said.
On how the ministry intends to use the new Security Agencies Competency Evaluation framework, Mr Tan said a key assessment area under the framework will be to what extent security agencies use technology to augment critical areas such as training, operations and command, control and communications.
"This will set new benchmarks for the industry," he added.
