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They told him he had to help out on a secret mission with a cybersecurity crime department to catch the criminals.
But the operations manager, in his 60s, first needed to transfer $ 190,000 to a Hong Kong bank account. They told him that the money would be used as bait to lure criminals who had allegedly used his Singtel WiFi network for illegal activities.
It was a scam and he was fortunate not to lose his money thanks to the efforts of OCBC Bank staff.
Last Friday, the police presented Community Partnership Awards to 108 individuals and 15 organizations, including OCBC, for their contributions in detecting and preventing scams.
Last year, more than $ 5 million in potential losses, in 91 scam incidents, were thwarted thanks to the intervention of the award winners.
This was a nearly four-fold increase compared to the amount intercepted in 2018, police said.
In the case of the operations manager, he made the transfer through OCBC’s online banking service on November 8 of last year, not realizing it was a scam.
But OCBC service officer Hilsham Helina Mohd Sahilman, 41, felt it was unusual for customers to make large one-time payments and checked their banking pattern to confirm before reporting to police.
Speaking to reporters at the Outram Park Police Cantonment Complex last Friday, Ms Helina, the award winner, said: “She didn’t want to share what the money was for and just said it was for a cousin in Hong Kong. Kong. Involves an unusually large amount of money, it is generally a scam. “
FRAUD SURVEILLANCE UNIT
Fortunately, Ms. Helina, who has worked at OCBC for 15 years, and OCBC’s fraud watch unit reversed the transfer and withdrew the money from the receiving bank.
Another recipient, Mr. Chi Xiaobiao, 52, an employee of the Hanshan Money Express remittance agency, prevented a woman from being cheated out of $ 15,000 in a sweepstakes scam in May last year.
The woman, who is 40, thought she was paying the $ 15,000 processing fee to claim a $ 600,000 prize.
Chi, who works at the agency’s People’s Park Complex branch in Chinatown, was convinced it was a scam and didn’t go through with the transaction. Instead, he called the police.
David Chew, director of the Department of Business Affairs, said that Covid-19 has accelerated digitization, which has led to more scams, with technology-related scams being one of the most common this year.
317 tech support scams were reported from January to June this year, an increase from 30 reports filed last year during the same period.
The total amount cheated through these types of scams last year was $ 340,000 and jumped to $ 15 million during the first half of this year.
Chew said, “The Community Partnership Award is a testament that the partnership between law enforcement and our community is important in combating this scam trend.”
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