SINGAPORE: A 22-year-old man will be charged in court on Friday (Mar 19) with cheating and using a forged document – a fake police pass – as genuine, the police said on Thursday.
The police received a report in December 2019 from a 65-year-old man who had received “unsolicited phone calls from scammers claiming to be officers from the Singapore Police Force”, the police said in a news release.
AdvertisementAdvertisementThe man was told that his bank accounts were involved in a money laundering investigation and that he was required to “surrender his financial assets for investigations,” the police said.
Believing the scammers were real police officers, the victim handed over his Internet banking token to the 22-year-old man when they met. The 22-year-old man allegedly showed the victim a fake “International Police” pass.
Subsequent investigations by the Commercial Affairs Department revealed that “the man arrested had allegedly acted on the instructions of the scammers to meet the 65-year-old victim to collect his Internet banking token,” the police said.
The victim later realised that S$42,189.60 had been transferred out of his bank account without his knowledge.
AdvertisementAdvertisementThe police said members of the public who receive such unsolicited calls should ignore the caller's instructions.
“No local government agency will demand payment through an undocumented medium like a telephone call or other social messaging platforms, demand that you surrender cash to unnamed persons, or ask you for personal banking information such as your internet banking passwords,” the police said.
The man will be charged on Friday with one count of cheating, which carries a jail term of up to 10 years and a fine.
He will also face two charges of “using as genuine a forged document”, for which he could be jailed for up to four years and/or fined.
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