SINGAPORE: A woman lost more than $1.14 million after scammers deceived her into cancelling an insurance policy she had never taken.
Individuals who pretended they were from National Trade Union Congress (NTUC) and Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) called the woman, a 37-year-old named Ms Wang, and told her how she could “cancel” the policy.
To do so required the woman to reveal some of her personal banking information. Afterwards, however, the scammers accessed her account and made over 20 transactions. In a span of four hours, the amount of $1,143,390 was transferred from her personal and business accounts into various other accounts, Shin Min Daily News recently reported. She and her husband have since filed a police report.
Ms Wang, who runs a ventilation equipment business with her husband, received a phone call on Feb 11 from someone who claimed to be with NTUC. The caller told her that she needed to pay $19,200 to renew an insurance policy for two years as it was going to expire soon.
Since she used to be a member of NTUC, she didn’t think it was a scam call. However, as she had no need of the policy, she said she was opting to cancel the policy.
Ms Wang next received a phone call from someone who claimed to be an NTUC manager, who told her that she needed to cancel the policy through her bank before 4:00 pm; otherwise, she faced an automatic deduction of $19,200 for the policy renewal.
Since Ms Wang had received the first call at 3:00 pm, she thought she had little time to do so. When she logged into her personal bank account, the fake NTUC manager called her again to ask if she needed help with the cancellation of the automatic deduction and said Ms Wang could be transferred to an employee from MAS who would walk her through the process.
By 5:00 pm, she received a video call from a person who said they were a MAS staff and who looked like he was wearing a MAS ID.
This man told her that if she had not been the one who applied for the insurance policy, it meant her personal information had been stolen. He then proceeded to ask her a number of questions about her bank accounts and business and told her she could not tell anyone about the matter.
When she told him that she could authenticate transactions on her phone via fingerprint, he said she would receive an OTP that needed authentication.
Unbeknownst to her, funds were already being transferred from her firm’s bank account. Neither did Ms Wang see the emails from her bank concerning the transactions.
It was only when the fake MAS employee told her, after more than an hour into the call, that money would have to be transferred from her account but would be refunded later that she grew suspicious. When she tried to log back into her firm’s account, she found that she could no longer do so.
Aside from the 22 transactions made from their business account, Ms Wang also lost money from three of her personal accounts, two of which had been set up for her mother and children. The scammers left her with only S$5,000 in the company account and around S$5 in her personal account. /TISG
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