WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
No matter the platform or conduit, the same principles remain, said SAC Chee.
“At a very fundamental level, scams are about the scammer designing some sort of deceit, being able to deliver that deceit, convince potential victims of that deceit … and the outcome they want to achieve is to be able to get money from the victims.”
This can then be distilled into two broad goals achieving that same outcome: To obtain the banking credentials of victims and make transactions; or have the victims believe the deceit and make the transfer themselves.
The good news is that even without the tech know-how, users can still take precautions against scams.
GovTech’s Mr Ng boiled down his advice to simply taking a step back when dealing with a request involving sensitive information.
“Think about why they might be asking you and verify as much as possible. So the ploys can change, their excuse can change. It could be a fake friend call, one day it could take place over a website.”
“Just having that pause and thinking for just five seconds whether am I doing the right thing or not, or (if) the urgency (is) even legitimate. Questioning that helps a lot in preventing a lot of these kind of cases,” he said.
Part of SPF’s strategy is to beef up the public’s knowledge and also reach out to as many potential victims as possible, especially on platforms used by scammers.
When law enforcement agencies observe a spike in a scam variant, they establish the “kill-chain” – or phases of an attack from an attacker’s perspective – before sieving out and publishing relevant information through advisories, news releases and social media posts.
This hopefully helps the public “raise a red flag in their minds”, should they come across similar circumstances, said SAC Shee.
“An easy way to deal with this is for police to put out a website and then just put everything there and say that I have done my due diligence … If you, as a member of public, don’t read it, it’s your problem,” he added.
“But we don’t see it as that. We do what we think is effective.”
