A Singaporean Woman Loses $94,000 to Scam and Realise It After Police Call Her
As people in Singapore are only allowed to go out less during this Covid-19 pandemic. Online space has shifted a lot of people’s lifestyles and scammer has been actively reported online as well. As 151 phishing scams have been reported between Apr 7 to May 7 itself.
A woman who wanted to know as Bavara, runs a business development consultancy firm that works with smaller companies. As one norm day, she claims that she received a call from Peter Costa claiming to be from Singtel. As his role is to ensure Bavara online banking sit was safe. Bavara admitted that she let her guard down as she was indeed a Singtel customer.
The whole scam started as he requests permission to use the team viewer on Bavara as tech support. Bavara aren’t aware of this as she has used Teamviewer with tech support staff before. Bavara mentioned that scammer is very polite and very professional. As she realized all this after she shared her OTPs (One-Time passwords) which is a bit too late and granting the scammer to gain access to two of her bank account making 6 transactions up to $170,000 without she realizing it.
The whole situation turned around after two days as Bavara received a call from police, that she has two outgoing transactions which is suspicious and blocked by the bank. Only by then, Bavara realise that she has been confronted by scammers all this while. CSA office told Bavara that they were confident of being to trace down this scammer as the Singapore government has provided a budget for the Cyber Security Agency to go after all these cybercrime cases. According to the Singapore Police Force (SPF), there were at least 50 such victims in October 2019.