Following the recent spate of reports that members of the public have fallen prey to scammers impersonating police officers, new reports have emerged showing that scammers are now also impersonating Land Transport Authority (LTA) and Immigration Checkpoints Authority (ICA) officials to con unsuspecting individuals.
The LTA announced today that members of the public have reported receiving calls from the LTA hotline by conmen pretending to be enforcement officers. LTA revealed on their Facebook page:
“The unknown caller claimed to be a government officer and requested for information such as personal data and payment matters.
“These calls were not made by government officers. We are currently conducting investigations and have alerted the Police.”
Online reports also suggest that scammers are pretending to be ICA officials in their attempts to fleece people under the guise of a government employee.
One netizen, Resmi Nigin, wrote to the ICA’s official Facebook page and reported that she had been receiving numerous calls by an unknown person who claims to be with the Authority. Nigin asked ICA for advice on “how to handle such callers who somehow seem to have got hold of our details, and threaten us on the fictitious cases they’ve come up with.”
She added that she is not sure how to stop receiving such calls:
These reports come less than a week after the Singapore Police Force reported that a 45-year-old woman lost a whopping $31,500 after falling victim to scammers operating a fake Singapore Police Force (SPF) website.
The police said yesterday that they received a report from the victim on Wednesday that a man claiming to be a police officer called her and asserted that she was under suspicion of being involved in illegal activities and that she was banned from leaving Singapore.
The victim then received another call from a different person who directed her to a webpage that appeared to be the SPF’s official website. The individual directed the victim to enter her bank account details before instructing the victim to provide her one-time password (OTP) over the phone.
The victim only discovered that the large sum of money had been transferred from her bank account without her authorisation when she received a call from her bank. She subsequently lodged a police report.
This report came only one week after a 20-year-old man lost $5,600 in another fake SPF website scam.
Meanwhile, government organisations themselves are being scammed by increasingly brazen conmen.
3 men and 2 women, believed to be members of a criminal syndicate, were charged in court this week after they scammed government training grants scheme, SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG), of a whopping $40 million through fraudulent claims.
According to a press statement released on Tuesday, SkillsFuture revealed that the group had submitted forged documents to fraudulently obtain subsidies and that the suspects reportedly belong to “an organised network that utilised nine business entities, comprising employer companies and training providers, to submit the fraudulent claims. Close to $40 million has been paid out as a result. Police has seized substantial cash and frozen a number of bank accounts involved in the case.”
https://theindependent.sg.sg/40-million-skillsfuture-scam-shows-the-deplorable-state-of-civil-service-and-leadership-ex-presidential-candidate/
#ScamAlert Members of the public have received calls from “6863 0117”, LTA’s Checkpoints Traffic Information hotline….
Posted by Land Transport Authority – We Keep Your World Moving on Wednesday, 20 December 2017