The officers explained that time was of the essence, as they needed to convince the victims that they had been scammed and to stop them from losing any more money.
The officers will keep on trying until the victims come around. They have even gone so far as calling their uniformed counterparts from the neighbourhood police posts to show up as a way to reassure the victims.
Once trust has been established, ASP Lim said that it will not be a “touch and go” situation, but a commitment to stay in communication with the victims until the case concludes.
For instance, if they determine that a victim is vulnerable, they will pull in more resources from the community police unit — formed for the purposes of engaging members of the community — to conduct house visits to the victim.
In some cases, the officers said that the victims started harbouring suicidal thoughts when they realised that they had been scammed.
When this happens, the police will arrange for a counsellor to talk them out of entertaining such thoughts.
The police did not go into details of how they managed to recover the 82-year-old woman’s savings, but they said that they took the extra step to ensure she would not lose them again.
Inspector Low said that they escorted the woman to the bank so that she could deposit the cheque that contained her recovered savings and even got the bank’s employees to deactivate the woman’s online banking account to “prevent her from being scammed again in…
