ANTI-SCAM ACTIONS IN PLACE, BUT CUSTOMER VIGILANCE MOST IMPORTANT
Despite the many media reports plus police advisories, people still fall prey to scams because scammers are “organised criminals”, suggested OCBC’s head of group legal and corporate compliance, Ms Loretta Yuen, during the media briefing last Friday.
“They are highly advanced. And the one thing that I’ve learned is that they’ve got a very, quite strong skill set. And this skill set they have is the best way to hack the human mind. They do this very well. ”
Ms Yuen added that most individuals have cognitive bias, believing a scam won’t occur to them. But she reinforced that “scams hit everyone … not just the old or the uneducated”.
“We are thinking how do we lift this particular red mist from the eyes of our client? How do we crack the spell? We are talking to experts (in) behaviour and we’re also looking at our banking process to see at which point (we can) do what we call a disruption or just-in-time disruption, ” she said.
As part of OCBC’s anti-scam measures, Ms Yuen highlighted the emergency kill switch which was introduced in Feb this year for customers to “suspend their accounts quickly if they believe their bank accounts are compromised”.
The change can be found at OCBC ATMs, in the OCBC digital app, or activated by pressing option “8” via the bank’s official contact number.
To date, the change has helped typically 27 customers per month to prevent their accounts from being possibly compromised by scammers.
Ms Yuen also said that the lender will deploy a team to SPF’s Anti-Scam Centre the following month to “enhance the speed of recovering funds stolen through scams”.
Police also have introduced several wedding and education tactics as anti-scam measures.
For instance, the particular ScamShield mobile app has seen greater than 5. 1 mil SMSes reported with least 24, 500 phone numbers believed to be useful for scam calls have been blocked since the app’s launch in Nov 2020. The app’s Android version is going to be made available next month.
A revamped bank to discover – made in collaboration with the Nationwide Crime Prevention Council, the Association associated with Banks in Singapore, MoneySense and the law enforcement – has also been folded out.
Yet, inspite of the best efforts associated with banks to raise scam awareness through training, Ms Yuen thinks education “is not really a silver bullet”.
“As much education and learning as we put out right now there, one thing that is also very important is the consumer vigilance. The customer must be vigilant; the public must be vigilant themselves, not to give out their OTPs … keep updated with scam techniques, scam typologies, so that they don’t fall prey, ” she told reporters.
“It takes a whole ecosystem to break the particular scam network. It isn’t really just the banks or the public sector such as NCPC (National Criminal offense Prevention Council) or maybe the police. The customer has to work with us. ”
ASP Lam echoed similar sentiments, saying that public awareness of the different scam types plus evolving scam techniques is key.
“We can do the necessary steps to intervene quickly. But if the victims refuse to be convinced, either by their lack of knowledge on the scam which they have fallen prey in order to or ignorance (in) thinking they will in no way be a victim associated with scams, it will affect the recovery and involvement process, ” he said.
HOUSEBREAKING, ROBBERY, VOYEURISM CRIMINAL OFFENSES FALL
As part of the mid-year crime statistics, police also revealed that the first half of 2022 recorded the lowest number of instances of housebreaking plus robbery in the past ten years.
There was also a decrease in voyeurism instances. These cases decreased to 216 within the first half of 2022 – a dip from 236 cases in the same period last year.
But voyeurism cases simply by unknown culprits saw an increase of 5 per cent. Locations that have been prone to voyeurism dedicated by unknown culprits were on open public transport, in home premises, and in buying complexes.
On the other hand, there was an increase within outrage of modesty cases in the initial half of 2022. An overall total of 773 instances were recorded, when compared with 739 in the same period last year.
And with cyber extortion cases, police exposed an increase in cases to 203 in the initial half of this year – up from 138 cases recorded within the first half of a year ago.
The total amount dropped by victims during these cyber extortion instances totalled more than S$754, 000, with Instagram being the most common system where victims were first approached, accompanied by Facebook and Tinder.
“In these types of cases, criminals typically befriend victims online and subsequently coax them into performing compromising or indecent works in front of a digital camera. Thereafter, the criminals would use the video clip or images to extort money or even online credits out there victims, ” mentioned SPF in its news release.
“In some instances, victims were inquired to visit a link in order to download an app that may result in allowing the criminals access to the victims’ get in touch with data which will after that be used to extort the victims. inch