E-mail
1. Information Theft
Information theft is when sensitive information is transmitted outside of trusted systems. One good example is when the information of one's credit card is being compromised. According to Nielsen Global Online Survey in year 2008, the number of internet shoppers rises up to 40 percent in two years.(see also statistics in finance.)
With the increase in online purchase, fake websites can be set up by criminals to obtain the consumer's information and their credit card number. Below are some credit fraud cases which had happened in Singapore.
Police arrested a man and a woman on suspicion of using cloned credit cards and ATM cards to make fraudulent withdrawals at local ATMs.
VINCENT Cheok Bok Soon, 34, placed recruitment advertisements of fictitious jobs to lure job-seekers to send their particulars to him. He used their particulars in his applications for several credit cards and chalked up bills of nearly $30,000 with these credit cards. After admitting forgery, he was jailed for more than four years.
Three Indonesians were arrested yesterday evening at Funan The IT Shopping Mall for carrying out fraudulent retail purchases using counterfeit credit cards.
2. Electronic Embezzlement
This is an act of taking a property that is entrusted in one's care and fraudulently for one's own use. Below is one of the famous case of embezzlement in singapore.
It was revealed that Thambirajah Tharmadurai (commonly know as Durai), Chief Executive Officer(CEO) of National Kidney Foundation(NKF) , collected a monthly salary of $25,000 and 10-month bonus in 2002 and 12-month bonus in both 2003 and 2004, for a total of $1.8 million over three years. He had access to a fleet of eight chauffeured cars and the NKF paid the taxes and maintenance costs of his personal Mercedes-Benz.
3. Phishing
This is one type of internet scam where large quantities of legitimate-looking emails known as 'bait' were send out by criminals. These emails often looks like it is from a trusted Internet Service Provider(ISP) or a financial institutions. An unsuspecting victim would click on the link from the email, and disclosed his or her own personal information. In Singapore, some recent phishing cases involves banks like Citibank, DBS and OCBC. One example is shown below.
A new fraudulent email stating that it is from Larry Lam, OCBC Bank's Head of Group Audit, inviting the recipient to send in your account information in order to claim the US$25.7 million. [1105sgict:2]
4. References
1) Commercial Affaris Department. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.cad.gov.sg/topNav/hom/
2) OCBC Bank. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.ocbc.com/personal-banking/tools%20and%20info/Fraud_emailScam2.html
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