SINGAPORE – It was a Friday in February 2025. June (not her real name), a communications professional in her 30s, was working in the office when she received a call at around 11am from a man claiming to be a Citibank representative.

June said the caller told her the bank had detected fraudulent activity on her Citibank credit card.

As she had experienced credit card fraud before and was quite preoccupied with work, she did not think further and “trusted her caller completely”.

She was then connected to a “police officer” as well as a “representative from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)”, who both told her she was a suspect in a money laundering case.

“They said I had to appear in court. Then they told me that because of this court order, they needed to freeze my assets and that I couldn’t go to work. So I needed to tell my employer,” she said.

“At that point, I was already very stressed.”

She also felt a pressing need to act fast to protect her money. “That sense of urgency lowers your ability to take a step back to think whether this even makes sense,” she added.

June was instructed to protect her assets by transferring at least 80 per cent of her money into a new account with digital bank GXS Bank for safe-holding.

So she moved about half of that amount from her DBS Bank account, and was about to transfer the rest when DBS called to stop her. All that transpired over a space of three to four hours.

In hindsight, June realised she had fallen for a government officials impersonation scam. 

The red flags were there – the scammers reached out to her on WhatsApp, she had a video call with an “MAS representative” and a “police officer” – but it did not occur to June at that point that she was being scammed.

“It is super ridiculous when...