In perhaps what was the worst banking scam case in the history of Singapore, hundreds of OCBC banking customers were caught off guard by a rather convincing phishing scam, which resulted in many of them losing their life’s savings.
The highly sophisticated scam involved scammers sending OCBC customers a SMS claiming that their bank accounts had been compromised, and that they needed to enter their banking details and OTP. Those who fell for the scam had their life’s savings transferred out of their bank accounts in a matter of hours. One such customer lost his life savings of $500,000 in little over two hours.
While we thought the worst was over, the scammers had now turned their cross-hairs on DBS customers. Sharing her experience on Facebook, Kelly Ong posted a screenshot of what appears to be a legitimate SMS from DBS, containing a link to verify her bank details. After checking with DBS, it turns out that no such SMS were sent to DBS customers.
Fortunately, Kelly Ong did not click on the link and did not fall prey to the scammers, and decided to warn others to be wary of these phishing SMSes.