SINGAPORE: On Wednesday (Nov 29), the police arrested a 31-year-old man for his alleged involvement in several e-commerce scams.

The man’s scams involved Apple MacBook laptops, where, between Oct 28 and Nov 2, he had allegedly sold MacBooks on the e-commerce platform Carousell. Still, victims received dummy items after they made payments via bank transfers. The man is believed to be involved in at least eight e-commerce scams amounting to more than $27,000. He will be charged in court on Nov 30 with cheating. If found guilty, he faces a jail term of up to 10 years and a fine.

During a two-week operation between Nov 10 and Nov 23, 229 men and 87 women aged between 15 and 73 were taken in for investigations. They were involved in more than 1,100 scams as either scammers or money mules. In a statement on Friday (Nov 24), the police said that the scams included job scams, malware-enabled scams, phishing scams, Internet love scams and e-commerce scams and involved losses of more than S$8.5 million.

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On Nov 22, the police also said in another statement that at least 93 people had fallen for a scam involving fake WhatsApp Web pages since the start of November, with total losses amounting to $176,000. The 93 are among at least 237 victims who fell for social media impersonation scams in general in the same month, with losses totalling at least $606,000. In these cases involving fake WhatsApp Web pages, scammers first gained control of compromised WhatsApp accounts after users clicked on unverified URL links while searching for the official WhatsApp Web page. Impersonating the original account user, scammers then contact the user’s family or friends on the account’s contact list to ask for loans.

The police also warned that scammers may entice buyers to contact them directly through messaging platforms such as WhatsApp or WeChat and offer a better or faster deal if bank transfer payments are made directly to them. “They may also use a local bank account or provide a copy of an NRIC or driver’s licence to make you believe that they are genuine sellers,” they added. The public can visit scamalert.sg or call the anti-scam hotline at 1800-722-6688 for more information. Anyone with information on such scams may call the police hotline at 1800-255-0000 or submit information online at www.police.gov.sg/iwitness. /TISG

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