The Commercial Affairs Department (CAD) of the Singapore Police Force and the Commercial Crime Investigation Department (CCID) of the Royal Malaysia Police have jointly solved a series of internet love scams reported in both countries.
Since September 2018, the Police have received several reports on a variant of internet love scams, and CAD and CCID have been working closely and sharing information with each other on such cases. In these cases, victims would usually meet the scammers online and subsequently get into online relationships with them. The scammers would then tell the victims that they would be sending parcels containing luxurious goods to the victims from abroad. Subsequently, the victims would receive phone calls from persons claiming to be customs officers, demanding payments of fines from the victims, purporting that the gifts sent by their ‘online lovers’ were detained at the checkpoints.
On 27 March 2019, acting on information provided by CAD, officers from CCID raided an apartment in Melaka, Malaysia and arrested a 30-year-old Nigerian man and a 26-year-old Malaysian woman. The duo is believed to be involved in at least 11 cases of such scams reported in Malaysia and Singapore. The victims suffered a loss of at least S$237,000. Several telecommunication devices, ATM cards and a laptop were seized.
Director CAD, Mr David Chew said, “We are working very closely with our foreign counterparts to fight transnational criminals who perpetrate scams behind the veil of the internet. I would like to thank Director CCID, Commissioner Dato’ Pahlawan Mazlan Bin Mansor and his officers from the Operations and Intelligence Division of CCID for their strong support and commitment in tackling cross-jurisdictional scams and ensuring that the perpetrators are brought to justice.”
Members of the public should be careful when befriending strangers online. They should also be wary when being asked to send money to bank accounts of people whom they do not know or who claim to be government officers.
For more information on scams, members of the public can visit scamalert.sg or call the Anti-Scam Hotline at 1800-722-6688. Anyone with information on such scams may call the Police hotline at 1800-255 0000 or submit information online at www.police.gov.sg/iwitness.
Photographs of exhibits seized during the joint operation (Credit: Commercial Crime Investigation Department / Royal Malaysia Police)
SINGAPORE POLICE FORCE
05 April 2019 @ 5:15 PM