At least $4.5m lost to Impersonation Scams
| 13 Apr 2020
At least $4.5m lost to Impersonation Scams

We would like to alert the public about scammers impersonating staff from local telecommunication service providers, or officers from government agencies who are offering technical support. Between January and March 2020, the Police received at least 125 reports of such scams, with total losses amounting to at least S$4.5 million. In some of the cases, victims would receive unsolicited phone calls from scammers impersonating staff members from local telecommunication service providers such as Singtel and Starhub. The scammers would deceive victims into believing that there were issues with their Internet connection and persuade them to download and install software applications such as ‘Teamviewer’ or ‘AnyDesk’ onto their computers, to allow remote access to their computers, on the pretext that this would enable the callers to help resolve the issues. Other cases involved scammers claiming to be from the ‘Cyber Crime Department of Singapore’ or the ‘Cyber Police of Singapore’, and deceive victims into believing that they had committed a criminal offence. The scammers would then direct the victims to download and install the abovementioned software applications on the pretext that doing so would help them better assist with investigations. In all these cases, once these software applications were installed on the victims’ computers, the scammers would use them to remotely access the victims’ computers and request the victims to log into their online bank accounts. When the victims were logged into their bank accounts, the scammers would surreptitiously transfer funds out of their bank accounts without them knowing that the transfers were actually happening.
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We would like to advise the public to take the following measures: |
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TeamViewer (Remote Access Software) |
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