S’pore company almost loses more than $300,000 to impersonation scam

SINGAPORE - A company here almost lost more than $300,000 after an employee fell for a ruse where scammers impersonated one of the company’s suppliers.

The police’s preliminary investigations showed that the employee of the product trading company received an e-mail on Jan 7 from a fake supplier, who had replaced the “gmail.com” in the real supplier’s e-mail address with “asia.com”.

The scammer requested payment for its services to be transferred to a new bank account in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), said the police in a press release on Feb 3.

Not noticing the fake e-mail address, the employee transferred more than $300,000 to the bank account.

She discovered the fraud on Jan 14, after the real supplier said it had not changed its bank account details, and made a police report the next day.

Neither the company nor the employee was named in the press release.

The police’s Anti-Scam Command worked with the UAE authorities and Interpol to recover the full sum that had been wrongly transferred, which was then returned to the company.

The number of scam cases in 2024 increased by 16.3 per cent,

with victims losing a record high of more than $385.6 million in the first six months of 2024.

Although investment scams made up only 12.5 per cent of the total number of scam cases in the first half of 2024, its victims lost $133.4 million – the highest amount lost among all types of scams, according to the police’s midyear scam and cyber-crime statistics released in August 2024.