SINGAPORE: Twelve people here are slated to be charged in court on Thursday (Sept 11), after they were arrested on Tuesday (Sept 9) in raids on a cross-border scam syndicate believed to be responsible for over S$40 million in losses.
The police said on Sept 10 that the suspects - eight Singaporean men, one Singaporean woman, two Malaysian men and one Filipino woman - were apprehended after police raided several locations on Sept 9, including residential apartments and hotel rooms.
The suspects are due to be charged for being members of a locally-linked organised criminal group under the Organised Crime Act.
Some of these suspects are allegedly callers for the syndicate, which is believed to be responsible for at least 330 reported cases, and had just returned to Singapore from Cambodia.
The police said their preliminary findings show that the syndicate’s members would travel to Cambodia willingly, and earned commissions for each successful scam they committed.
As part of a joint operation, the Cambodian National Police (CNP) also raided a building and a warehouse in Phnom Penh, where they found electronic devices and equipment believed to have been used by the syndicate.
During the joint operation, more than $2.5 million in funds from bank accounts and cryptocurrency wallets, 53 electronic devices, copies of scam scripts and victims’ records were seized, the Singapore police said.
The raids follow information sharing and joint investigations by police from both countries, which revealed that the syndicate was secretly operating out of a scam centre in Phnom Penh, and targeted victims in Singapore.
The Singapore police said they had been receiving reports of government official impersonation scams since December 2024.
In such ruses, scammers would first call the victims and pretend to be staff from banks, before directing the victims to another scammer.
The second conman would impersonate a government official - either a police officer or an official from the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
Then, the fake government official would con the victims into believing that their bank accounts were implicated in an ongoing criminal investigation.
The victims are then ordered to surrender the funds in their bank accounts for investigations through bank transfers to accounts controlled by the syndicate.
The Cambodian police’s operation is still ongoing and the Singapore police said they are working closely with foreign law enforcement agencies to find other syndicate members who are still at large, and to arrest them. - The Straits Times/ANN
