SINGAPORE (Commonwealth Union) _ Accepting a friend request on Facebook from a stranger turned into a nightmare for a 65-year-old Singaporean retiree, who ended up losing her entire life’s savings of $1,078,053.62 in 15 days.
Madam Tan (not her real name) met Alvin who claimed to be the Singaporean chief executive of an interior design firm in Britain, on the social media platform in August. He said he was about to complete his final project being a hotel in London, before retirement and asked her to facilitate payments for him, which made her initially distrustful.
Alvin said he could not procure materials from companies in China, and had been referred to a particular one in Sabah, but needed her to act as an intermediary since he could not speak Mandarin.
He made bank transfers to her account that were worth more than the cost of the materials, to convince her that everything was legitimate, and that it would be credited within two to four days.
He even claimed he sent her the transfer statements from the British bank Barclays, showing her transfer statements that not only eased Madam Tan’s fears, but also convinced her to part with her money.
Except that it was all a ruse.
The transfer statements Madam Tan received had telltale signs that they were fake. There were different font sizes used across the three documents while the dates appeared to be formatted haphazardly, ranging from “Sep 04” to “Sep 5” and then “Sep 07”, among other inconsistencies.
Between 4th September and 19th September, Madam Tan did not know any better. She believed the scammer, who had told her the transfers would take a few days to be processed even though she had not received any deposits into her bank account,.
When told that she needed to settle additional fees such as shipping and taxes, she believed the scammer, making transfers of at least $20,000 each time. This took place on 22 occasions.
She even borrowed $10,000, from her 30-year-old son for her final transaction of $50,000,.
She took money from her CPF account, and a bank loan of $24,000 to continually make the payments.
The scam was finally uncovered on 20th September, after Madam Tan received a phone call from a Malaysian number and was told that her British “business partner” was detained at the airport for having too much cash.
She was told she needed to pay $98,000 for him to be cleared by the Malaysian authorities.
However, her son stopped her before she could approach her 32-year-old daughter for money telling her that she was probably being scammed.
Of the three phone numbers that Madam Tan had, calls and messages to two lines went unanswered while the third number was no longer linked to the messaging app.
Madam Tan said she had wiped out 40 years of her savings, and was also in debt because of the bank loan.
She said she filed two police reports immediately after, and the police are investigating the matter.
Her daughter helped her to write to the different banks Standard Chartered and UOB, which she has accounts with, as well as OCBC and DBS, where she had transferred the money to, for assistance.
All four banks told ST that they would assist the police with their investigations.
A UOB spokesman said: “We regret that Madam Tan fell victim to an investment scam. It is understandably a difficult time for her and her family.”
He added that bank transfers above $5,000 require authentication through UOB’s digital token, and stressed that the security measures adopted by banks are not foolproof. The banks had strong security measures in place to monitor suspicious transactions, and strongly urged their customers to exercise vigilance and caution in this ever evolving threat landscape.
Madam Tan is among an increasing number of scam victims.
There were 22,339 scam cases reported in the first half of 2023, a 64.5 per cent increase from the 13,576 reported during the same period in 2022.
