Woman loses over $18,000 in scam related to fake Lazada gift vouchers

A woman who responded to WhatsApp messages that appeared to be sent from a long-lost friend has lost over $18,000 in a scam related to fake Lazada gift vouchers.

The 55-year-old woman, known only as H, received a message on Jan 13 from a "friend" that she had not been in contact with for more than a year, reported citizen journalism site Stomp.

The message, which appeared to be accompanied by Turkish text, claimed to contain a six-digit code that would help H and the friend win Lazada gift vouchers.

The woman followed instructions to "Reset Lazada Customer Password" and then received a congratulatory message informing her that she had won $1,400 cash from "Lazada's 8th years campaign".

H took a screenshot of the message and sent it to her friend, who in turn told H that she had "won before". The friend then instructed H to send her photos of the front and back of her credit card and the one-time PIN sent to her to approve online purchases.

The friend assured H that no purchase was being made.

H later received a message from her bank that two charges of $9,836.10 each had been made by Lazada on her credit card.

When she asked her friend about the charges, the friend again assured her that she would not be charged, adding that it was standard procedure to have $98 credited to her bank account for each one-time PIN verified.

H then checked the Lazada website about an hour later and found that there was no such campaign on the online shopping site.

When H called the bank to try to cancel the transactions, she was told that she could only cancel the card as the transactions had been verified by the one-time PIN.

H then checked her phone and saw that her friend's WhatsApp profile photo was gone and the messages had been deleted.

The police issued an advisory on a similar fake Lazada campaign on Instagram in May last year.

They noted that in the first five months of last year, they received at least 14 reports of such scams, which cheated victims of at least $14,000 in the same period.

The police, who are investigating the latest incident, urged the public to verify the authenticity of requests by contacting the friend the messages are supposedly sent from and not to transfer money or give out bank details.