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SINGAPORE – Lyena (not her real name) was kept on the phone for two hours by a scammer posing as a Microsoft support employee, during which she managed to obtain her bank details and arrange a $ 35,000 transfer of your account.
It was a traumatic experience for the 60-year-old educator, although the money was eventually recovered thanks to the swift action of the police.
Speaking to reporters in a telephone interview on Saturday morning (September 12), Lyena said she saw a pop-up message on her computer the night of May 28, saying that her computer was “at risk” and that she had to search help immediately. .
As the antivirus software on her computer had just expired at that point, Lyena panicked at the thought that her computer had been infected by a virus and called the number provided in the pop-up message.
“The man who picked up the phone introduced himself as a Microsoft employee and sounded very professional. He asked me to install UltraViewer, an application that would give him remote access to my computer, so that he could find out what the problem was,” Lyena said.
In a two-hour phone conversation, the scammer convinced Lyena that her computer had been hacked by eight people and even provided photos of these “hackers.”
“Then he told me that I had to give him my bank account details so that I could protect my bank account from these hackers, which I did stupidly,” he said.
Lyena received a call from her bank the next morning informing her that $ 35,000 had been transferred from her account to another bank account.
It was then that she realized she had been scammed and made a police report immediately.
Lyena said she is grateful that the police carried out their investigations quickly and was able to recover $ 33,000 in three days and the remaining $ 2,000 shortly after.
“I never would have thought that I would become a victim of a scam and it was a really traumatic experience. Since then I have installed antivirus software on both my phone and my computer,” he said.
Alan Kit, a senior investigative officer for the Department of Business Affairs, said police immediately contacted the banks to freeze the accounts when Lyena filed the report.
“We got the details of the beneficiary who had received $ 35,000 from Lyena’s bank account. My colleague and I went to his address immediately and were able to recover $ 33,000 in cash,” Kit said.
The remaining $ 2,000 had been frozen in the beneficiary’s bank account and the police obtained a court order to return the money to Lyena.
Kit added that the scammers had contacted the beneficiary, who is a businessman, and gave him the excuse of buying surgical gloves to deposit $ 35,000 into his account.
The beneficiary had withdrawn $ 33,000 to pay his glove supplier and had no idea the money was the victim of a scam.
In the first half of this year, there were 317 cases of tech support scams reported to the police, more than 10 times the 30 cases in the same period last year.
The victims lost a total of $ 15 million, up from $ 340,000 in the same period last year. It is the second largest amount cheated on victims, the first being investment scams for $ 22.3 million.
The largest amount cheated in a single case in the first six months of this year was $ 958,000.
Kit said that scammers posing as tech support personnel are on the rise now that many people work from home.
He advised the public not to follow the instructions for installing applications, typing commands on the computer, or logging into bank accounts online.
“All incoming international calls are prefixed with a plus sign and the public should be careful when receiving unsolicited calls from abroad,” he said.
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