Online scams on increase in Singapore
Print Edition
SOARING numbers of Singaporeans — mostly women — are falling victim to “Internet love scams” as criminals are exploiting lonely hearts increasingly turning to the web to find partners, police said in a Valentine’s Day warning yesterday.
The number of people robbed by online con artists faking romantic interest before tricking people out of money jumped 62 percent between 2012 and 2013, police said at a crime briefing.
Official figures also show e-commerce rackets doubled to 509 in 2013.
The total amount reported lost to such forms of fraud in 2013 was S$6.01 million (US$4.75 million), police said, a steep rise from S$1.2 million in 2012.
Police said the victims of the online love scams were mainly women searching for partners in social networks and on dating websites.
The perpetrators, who mostly claimed to be British, though it is unclear where they were actually from, would ask the victims to transfer money to save them from difficult situations.
Ng Guat Ting, the police director of public affairs, attributed the surge in cyber crime to rising Internet usage in the Southeast Asian city-state. Official figures show 84 percent of Singapore’s 5.4 million population have access to the Internet.
“There are more people and more traffic, and therefore there will be an increase in criminal elements,” Ng said.
She did not say why the figures rose so much in 2013 but said many of the cases were due to people entrusting money to others they had never met. The scams mainly hit people who made purchases of technology products but did not receive what they paid for.
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