Woman loses $20,000 in government officials impersonation scam

The “police” gave her a choice: Surrender her savings for investigation or spend two months in lock-up.

Marilyn, who declined to share her real name due to privacy concerns, panicked. The 29-year-old Singaporean was unemployed then, with a job interview the following week in February 2025.

Desperate, she transferred $19,500 to an unknown bank account.

“If I didn’t have a job interview that week, I probably wouldn’t have been scammed,” says Marilyn, who now works in finance.

That morning she was jolted awake by an 8am phone call on her mobile phone. The caller, who sounded Filipino, introduced herself as a DBS bank officer. There was a suspicious transaction on Marilyn’s account, she claimed. 

Marilyn does not use her DBS account, and had emptied it years ago. She shared her details – including her NRIC number – with the “bank officer”, hoping to close the inactive account. But she was transferred to the “police” to report the suspicious transaction.

She recalls: “It was early in the morning. I was tired and I just thought if I could file a police (report) over the phone, why not?”

What followed was two hours across two WhatsApp calls with police impersonators who sounded Singaporean, using names like Lee Kok Fai and Foo Shi Hao. They told Marilyn her name and NRIC were linked to a money laundering case. 

A fake arrest warrant, bearing the logo of the Singapore Police Force (SPF), was sent to her over WhatsApp.

To avoid detention, the scammers said she had to apply for a “financial assessments probe”, which involved the transfer of her money into a “security account” set up by them, for checks by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. She complied.

Marilyn was one of 3,363 cases of government officials impersonation scams (GOIS) in 2025. 

Though the overall number of scam cases and amount lost fell in 2025 compared with the year before, GOIS bucked the trend. SPF’s annual scam statistics show that the number of GOIS cases more than doubled from 1,504 cases in 2024. GOIS victims lost $242.9 million in 2025 – the second-highest loss among all scam types, behind investment scams.

Government official impersonators “prey on victims’ trust and tendency to comply with authority figures”, says Police Superintendent Rosie Ann McIntyre, assistant director of the Scam Public Education Office’s operations department. They “undermine victims’ ability to process the situation by evoking fear and a sense of urgency to resolve the situation”.

Urgency and fear – that her personal details were stolen and used illegally – were what kept Marilyn on the call.

“When I first received the call, I thought it was a scam,” says Marilyn. “But they sounded so professional; the longer I stayed on the call, the more I fell for it.”

Even as the authorities have put in place anti-scam measures, scammers continue to adapt. They exploit vulnerabilities of victims and local infrastructure such as mobile lines, bank accounts and shell companies through local mules to perpetrate their scams, says Supt McInytre.

In Marilyn’s case, the scammers asked for screengrabs of her bank account and had her transfer an amount that was lower than her previous highest transaction. This suggests that they were cautious to stay under certain thresholds to avoid immediate detection, say the police.

They also instructed her to label the recipient account with her own name, likely to create a false sense of security that she would get her money back.

Only after Marilyn told her younger sister what had happened did she realise she had been scammed. She filed a police report. But the money was lost.

Now, Marilyn keeps minimal sums in her bank account, locking funds in investment products to prevent immediate withdrawals. She also checks in with her sister before making any transactions above $1,000.

“She’s my real-life two-factor authentication,” she says.

The police will also never identify themselves with the Singapore Police Force warrant card online.

How can you tell if the warrant card is real in person? Look out for these security features: 

This is part of a series titled “Act against scams”, in partnership with the Singapore Police Force and the National Crime Prevention Council.