Police warn against latest round of SMS scams; 60 DBS customers duped

ABOUT 60 DBS customers have each lost between S$60 and S$3,000 to recent phishing scams.

Another S$173,000 belonging to 600 customers has been successfully recovered in the past month through anti-scam efforts mounted by the bank and the police, the two parties said in a joint statement on Wednesday (Jun 8).

In the latest round of scams, members of the public received unsolicited SMS messages with alpha tags such as “SG-DBS” or “DBS-Notice” claiming that their cards issued by the bank had been blocked due to unusual activity, or that their bank account had been frozen because of suspicious activities.

The message would then direct victims to sign in via an embedded link to verify their identity. Upon clicking on the link, victims are brought to a spoofed Internet banking log-in page, and asked to key in their online banking details.

They are next redirected to another spoofed Web page that requires them to key in the one-time password sent to their mobile phones. Victims realise they have been scammed when they see that unauthorised transactions have been made from their bank accounts.

The police and DBS reiterated that banks will never send SMS messages with clickable links, and that users should not click on links in these messages that are purportedly from banks.