She clicked an SMS that she thought was from her bank. It brought her to a link that looked like the bank’s internet banking login page.
After the bank user keyed in her authentication code, hackers hijacked her bank account and drained it of her entire life savings. That was it – within minutes, hard-earned years of savings were wiped clean and “disappeared”.
For another bank scam victim who was willing to be named, John Paul Tan said that his and his wife’s life savings were wiped out, in not one – but five fraudulent overseas bank transfers. The bank managed to retrieve two out of five transactions within days.
This was one of the most rampant cases of bank-related fraud in 2021. At least 469 customers from one of Singapore’s largest banks OCBC were scammed of their money amounting to a total of S$8.5 million.
Phishing attacks through emails and text messages have been intensifying in recent times. Often, the ones that fall prey to such scams are those who are less tech-savvy, like the elderly, or those who aren’t in the know of such scams happening.
Meanwhile, other customers fall into the deception because the scams are just too realistic. For OCBC’s case, the SMS messages were spoofed and appeared in the bank’s official thread.
What happened?
As early as Dec last year, scammers were impersonating OCBC and sending out SMS phishing messages with links to fake websites. The bank tried to reduce the number of attacks – like…
