The case, disclosed by the Singapore Police Force on May 20, was part of a two-month transnational anti-scam operation involving 10 jurisdictions, Mothership reported.
The CEO received the WhatsApp call on April 9 from a scammer posing as the chairman of his firm’s headquarters, who instructed him to take charge of an acquisition project, according to the police. The CEO subsequently directed his chief financial officer to arrange the funding.
Between April 13 and 17, a total of $36.3 million was moved from the company’s overseas and local bank accounts into two local OCBC accounts. Of that sum, $27.1 million originated from the firm’s Luxembourg subsidiary and $9.7 million from its Singapore entity, The Straits Times reported.
The fraud was uncovered on April 17 only after the CEO verified the purported acquisition with the actual chairman. By then, approximately $26.5 million had already been wired out to bank accounts in Hong Kong. The Anti-Scam Centre of the Singapore Police Force seized the $9.7 million still sitting in the local accounts and contacted Hong Kong’s Anti-Deception Coordination Centre, which led to the recovery of more than $11.1 million from Hong Kong bank accounts and associated cryptocurrency wallets.
Two Singaporeans accused of facilitating the opening of a corporate bank account to receive the illicit funds have since been arrested, with investigations ongoing.
The case was part of Operation FRONTIER+ III, a coordinated crackdown that ran from March 10 to May 7 and involved more than 3,200 officers from Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Malaysia, the Maldives, Thailand, Macau, Indonesia, Brunei, and Canada.
Across the 10 jurisdictions, 3,018 people aged 13 to 85 were arrested and 7,553 individuals linked to over 138,000 scam cases are under investigation, the SPF said. About $752 million in losses was involved. Nearly 102,000 bank accounts were frozen and more than $161 million in illicit funds were seized.
In Singapore alone, police arrested more than 130 people and are investigating over 1,000 others linked to more than 3,000 scam cases involving over $54 million in losses, with 2,315 bank accounts frozen, Channel News Asia reported.
Business email compromise scams, which exploit trust in known counterparts and authority figures rather than technical vulnerabilities, have become one of the costliest forms of corporate fraud globally. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has consistently ranked them among the highest-loss cybercrime categories tracked in its annual reports.
Comments are closed.