A house cleaning service that a woman found on Facebook agreed to four hours of cleaning for $25.
The bogus company had reached out to Ms Lu Meilin, 47, via a WhatsApp account linked to a Malaysian phone number.
When they had scheduled the cleaning service, she was asked to download an app on her phone and make a deposit of $5, reported Shin Min Daily News on Thursday (Nov 25).
Ms Lu made the payment through a credit card, keying in the cardholder’s name, number, expiry date, and verification code (CVC).
To make a long story short, the fraudulent company ended up taking $4,300 from her.
Ms Lu told Shin Min Daily News that when she had filled in the online form, the page told her that her card was “invalid.”
Believing that her payment did not go through, she did not give the matter much thought.
She was also told by the company that she could pay in cash.
However, shortly afterward, her bank told her that the card had surpassed its limit, much to her surprise. A total of three bank transfers had been made using her card, amounting to $4,300.
If her card had not reached its limit, at least one more transaction would have followed.
Ms Lu has since cancelled the card and filed a police report.
Scams are so prevalent these days that Singapore has a dedicated website just for the latest information concerning them, which can be found at www.scamalert.sg.
It lists the top five types of scams in Singapore, which are, job scams, phishing scams, online purchase scams, investment scams, and loan scams. The site also makes it easy for anyone who’s been victimised by scammers to file online or in-person reports and has a lot of useful information to help scam victims with what they can do.
People with any information about scams may call the police hotline at 1800-255-0000, or submit it online at www.police.gov.sg/iwitness.
Netizens commenting on her story sympathized with Ms Lu, but a number of commenters said that in this day and age of scams, she could have, and should have known better.
The amount she was being charged for cleaning should have been a dead giveaway that it was a scam, they argued.
Some pointed out that the saying “if it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t” certainly applies in this case.
The fact that she was asked to download an app was another clue that a scam was coming.
Nevertheless, one commenter said the scammer was “very clever.” /TISG