Skip to main content

Advertisement

Advertisement

Crime rate up as more S’poreans are lured by fake deals and lust

SINGAPORE — The Republic’s streets may be among the safest in the world, but in the digital space, more and more here are falling for scams, lured by love, lust and the draw of the too-good-to-be-true deal.

Posters warning the public against online scams. Images: SPF

Posters warning the public against online scams. Images: SPF

Follow TODAY on WhatsApp

SINGAPORE — The Republic’s streets may be among the safest in the world, but in the digital space, more and more here are falling for scams, lured by love, lust and the draw of the too-good-to-be-true deal. 

The number of e-commerce cheating, credit-for-sex and Internet love scams almost doubled to 3,759 cases last year, driving the 4 per cent increase in the total number of crimes here, and continuing an upward trend also seen in 2014. These three types of crimes saw victims scammed of a total of more than S$16 million.

In all, there were 33,608 crime cases last year, up from the 32,315 cases in 2014, according to annual crime statistics released by the police today (Feb 12). Overall, the crime rate, while still low, inched up from 591 per 100,000 general population in 2014 to 607 per 100,000 last year.   

Commenting on the spike in online commercial crimes at a press conference today, Commercial Affairs Department director David Chew said: “Singapore is a target because we have a wonderful infrastructure for the Internet. We have a high-speed optic fibre, we are a safe community and people are lulled into a sense of complacency because we are safe on our streets, but they don’t realise that the criminals use this sense of safety to scam us into transacting with them.”

There could be even more cases of online fraud than what is reported, as many victims are too ashamed to tell the police they have been scammed, he noted.

(Click to enlarge)

While nearly all classes of crime saw declines from 2014 — such as the decades-low number of cases involving unlicensed money lending-related harassment and motor-vehicle thefts — the reverse was evident in three areas of online commercial crime: E-commerce cheating, credit-for-sex, and Internet love scams.

Credit-for-sex scams saw the biggest jump among these three categories — there were 1,203 cases last year, 18 times the number in 2014 (66 cases). 

The scammers would befriend the victims — who are mostly male — through various online-media platforms before convincing them to buy gift cards in exchange for meet-ups, massages, or sexual or escort services. Most victims were aged between 20 and 39 years old. In all, they were cheated of about S$2.9 million, with the largest amount scammed at S$74,000. 

More — mainly women — also fell prey to Internet love scams last year. Most culprits would claim to be from the United Kingdom and build relationships with the victims over the Internet before cheating them. 

Such cases nearly doubled from the 198 cases in 2014 to 383 cases last year, and a majority of these victims were female, aged between 30 and 60 years old. These victims were cheated of about S$12 million in all last year. 

Cases of e-commerce cheating, stemming from those who were buying or selling goods online, also saw a 30.5 per cent jump, from 1,665 cases in 2014 to 2,173 cases last year. 

The victims, mostly aged between 20 and 49 years old, were cheated of about S$1.76 million in all.

To tackle the growing number of online scams, the police said they plan to intensify their public education efforts so that more will be aware of the evolving modus operandi of these online crooks.

Pressed on the fact that many still fall prey to online fraud, Mr Chew said a lot of these offences take place in the privacy of the bedroom or mobile phones, and there is a “great deal of difficulty” in intervening at every stage of the various online transactions. 

“To actually stop the crime from taking place, it would take a bit of time, a bit of education, a bit of enforcement, take a bit of busting foreign syndicates that target us,” he added.

The police are also working with foreign law-enforcement counterparts to crack down on overseas syndicates that are targeting Singaporeans for online fraud. 

Last year, the police conducted an eight-month joint investigation with Chinese law enforcement into a fraud syndicate that targeted Singaporean victims. 

They operated from call centres in China and used social media platforms to deceive victims into paying for non-existent sexual services. Following the arrests made by the Chinese authorities, there was a 68 per cent drop in such cases in January this year. 

Cyber extortion cases also fell by 66.1 per cent last year, bucking the trend of increasing online scams. There were 87 cases of cyber extortion last year, down from the 257 cases in 2014. This was in part due to the two operations involving the Singapore Police Force, Interpol and the Philippine police, which busted a Filipino syndicate, said the police.

Read more of the latest in

Advertisement

Advertisement

Stay in the know. Anytime. Anywhere.

Subscribe to get daily news updates, insights and must reads delivered straight to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, I agree for my personal data to be used to send me TODAY newsletters, promotional offers and for research and analysis.