SINGAPORE: A 34-year-old woman is due to be charged on Friday (Aug 2) over allegedly fake hotel room bookings, where victims lost more than S$1.3 million in all.
Police said on Aug 1 that they received reports from victims who said they were cheated by a seller offering discounted hotel room packages for popular Singapore hotels through a social media platform.
The reports were made between mid-December 2021 and December 2022.
“After payments were made by the victims through bank transfers and PayNow, they allegedly failed to receive the bookings,” the police added.
The woman was then identified and arrested for cheating, they said.
The woman is believed to be involved in more than 900 such bookings, with victims losing more than $1.3 million.
If convicted of cheating, she could be jailed for up to 10 years and fined.
In February, police said that 46,563 scam cases were reported in Singapore in 2023, the highest figure since they started tracking scams in 2016.
E-commerce scams more than doubled in 2023 with 9,783 cases – up from around 4,700 in 2022. Victims lost at least $13.9 million, down from $21.3 million in 2022.
Almost half of such scams involved victims aged 30 to 49, and the two most common platforms used by scammers were Facebook and Carousell. - The Straits Times/ANN
