25% related to the cryptocurrency sector
The citizens of Singapore lost more than $ 1.1 billion last year due to online scams, 70% more than 2023: the city-state police announced it.
25% of the total concerned the scams related to cryptocurrencies, underlined the director of the police commercial affairs department, David Chew, who spoke of an “alarming” data. The scammers take advantage of the speed with which cryptocurrencies can be transferred and the difficulty in tracing them once moved to anonymous digital portfolios. Much of these scams concerns investment patterns that promise high returns, followed by fraud-related fraud and false job offers.
Another alarming figure is the growing sophistication of social engineering techniques, which induce victims to voluntarily deliver their money to the scammers.
According to the statistics, three out of four victims give up the funds in an apparently consenting way, making the intervention of the authorities even more difficult.
Singapore is in third place in the world for losses related to online scams, after the United States and the United Kingdom. To counteract this phenomenon, the Singapore Parliament approved last month the new bill on scam protection. The legislation gives the police the power to block the transfers of money from the bank accounts of citizens in advance if there is a suspicion that they can be victims of scams.
