Letter to the Editor: Banks need to accept more responsibility for protecting customers against scams

I am Siti, a mother of seven wonderful children. A wife to a caring educator. A victim of the most recent OCBC Scam.

I am grateful that celebrities like Jamie Yeo are making the plight of our family more visible. Echoing our pain so something can be done, this is so much more compared to the silence we are hearing from OCBC right now. Over 16 days have passed and all the news that OCBC has given us, is a hastily replied extension of the timeline to 45 days for any answers. You would think, since this has happened to OCBC before, that they would have a department that offers a human touch in dealing with the heartbreak of losing your life’s savings. But no. No responses. No updates. No financial assistance. Nada.

Life has to go on for us, the victims. But how? I feel so helpless at the lack of help. Especially when I see the faces of my children, the real victims in this case – $60,000 of my children’s future wiped out. The monies we have so frugally saved, to ensure that they have a chance for success – gone.

Ong Ye Kung spoke in Parliament on Feb 26, 2021 about the Monetary Authority of Singapore promoting e-payment systems and banking. Singapore is barrelling towards the online space but whilst this may help our country and our businesses improve their systems, the government should put in stricter controls that hold our banks accountable against scams.

Singaporeans have lost 168 million to scams just in the first half of 2021 alone, and no longer are victims elderly and uneducated as these scams become more sophisticated. More must be done to protect the regular citizens. How can our banks like OCBC normalise this when it has happened so many times before? My family refuses to simply be a statistic that is forgotten.

On 28 December 2021, at 1147am, I received an SMS which looked exactly like the ones I received from the OCBC SMS system itself, with the following text, “The transaction function of your OCBC account will be suspended. To prevent the account from being locked out, update it on December 28. Access bit.ly/3qp***.” At that time, I was occupied with my children thus I did not act upon it. However, I kept a mental note that I need to do something about it later.

At 2pm, I re-read the SMS and followed the instructions and clicked on the link. It brought me to an authentic looking OCBC site. As I was anxious about the account being suspended and I had to make some transactions to my children’s savings later in the day, I did not think further, and keyed in my username and password and other relevant details and checked into my account.

A few moments later, I received a notification stating that my transfer limit has been increased to $100,000. When I noticed that I immediately called OCBC as it happened without my approval. However, OCBC’s hotline is not equipped to immediately handle scams which are in progress as I was faced with an automated system for a long time before ever reaching the real-life agent. By this wasted time I had already received multiple notifications stating that monies were transferred out of my savings accounts and six of my children’s savings accounts. In just a few minutes, almost $100,000 was gone.

We have since made a police report but we have been told that even though accounts are insured by up to $50,000 we are unlikely to have any of our funds returned to us as it was my mistake for clicking on the link.

How can the blame be pinned entirely to me when

1. This is not the first time OCBC has been embroiled in a scam and yet it keeps reoccurring to their clients.

2. The SMS came from their own network which has been compromised.

3. Their scam prevention is so poorly equipped to urgently deal with the cases as it is happening.

This seems to be a nightmare I cannot wake up from. My husband reassures me that we will be fine, but the stress has caused me acute gastritis. I found myself collapsed in pain a few days after outside of the bathroom of Our Tampines Hub where a good Samaritan found me and I was rushed to the hospital. How can OCBC expect us to wait patiently for up to 45 days when the reality of this is hitting my family hard? How can I explain to my seven children that they have been robbed of the future their parents have so painstakingly worked to save for? What more do we as parents need to do to protect them when we have done everything we can? Please, we feel so helpless.

With regards,

Siti Raudhah bte Mohd Ali

Tampines