SINGAPORE: Workers’ Party MP Sylvia Lim (Aljunied GRC) spoke of the crisis of confidence in digital banking because so many people have been scammed recently. The WP chair herself was almost a victim, but she managed to avoid losing money.
In Parliament on Wednesday (Jan 10), Ms Lim spoke on the importance of restoring trust in virtual communications due to scams and the risks of artificial intelligence.
She underlined that more should be done to protect people from getting victimized by scammers and that the government and businesses should lead the way in these efforts.
Ms Lim noted that the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) has said that out of 1.6 billion international calls made to Singapore yearly, around one-fourth, or 300 million calls, were believed to be scam calls and were blocked by telcos from January to September last year.
“To block 300 million calls is a staggering statistic, but I would surmise that many other scam calls would have gotten through. Our parents, residents and we ourselves are all in the pool of potential victims,” said Ms Lim.
And while she acknowledged that banks “appear to be taking more steps to prevent scams and stop scams in progress,” she added that banks, quite naturally, need to do this since they make “healthy profits” and also have the resources and expertise to do more to detect and prevent scams.
But scams continue to evolve, and scammers now even impersonate officers from the Monetary Authority (MAS). Phishing scams involving PayLah have effectively spoofed SMS messages sent by DBS, one of which she herself received.
“On New Year’s Day this year, I too received the SMS about a withdrawal of $289 from my PayLah account, and a link to stop the transaction if it was unauthorised.
As I was in the midst of some work then, I did not scrutinise the message carefully and clicked on the link to stop the transaction. The link then brought me to a page to enter banking credentials, whereupon I had my Eureka moment and stopped in my tracks.”
However, some residents who received the same SMS had gone on to get scammed and came to her Meet People Session “in desperation.”
She said she has concluded that scammers “must have very good consultants” as even modes of savings believed to be very safe turn out not to be so.
“I would not like to exaggerate the situation, but I would say that we are moving towards a crisis of confidence in digital banking without stronger intervention by government regulators.”
She added that MAS should ensure that banks behave responsibly and ethically, having heard from the public that they believe banks’ interests will always be protected at the expense of the consumer.
“I hope that the MAS will demonstrate that this is not true,” added Ms Lim. /TISG
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