Sham scams
Online resources are aplenty to help weed out tricksters, but how is one to figure out if a physical letter is the genuine article?
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ALL me paranoid, but I feel like scams are everywhere. Between the countless news reports of increasingly creat- ive phishing scams, and the random messages I receive from my parents asking if something they've received is real, it's hard not to think there's a flimflam around every corner.
That my husband deals in anti-fraud surely doesn't help either; I've heard some crazy stories about tricksters and the trail of destruction they can leave in their wake.
Given all of this, I'm naturally in favour of public education campaigns that raise our awareness of scams. scamalert.sg is particularly great; apart from providing up-to-date news and resources on scams in Singapore, the National Crime Prevention Council-run (NCPC) website even has a "Could this be a scam?" tool, which allows you to search its entire scam database using any keyword you'd like. It lets you search by scam type, too - there are 24 categories in all, spanning everything from "credit-for-sex" ruses to "wangiri" ploys.
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