You will be able to take the first steps that give the best chance of stopping further losses.
It's 9.40pm. You've just put the phone down on someone who said he was from your bank's fraud team, and because something he said at the end didn't sit right, you open your banking app and find two transfers you didn't make, S$4,000 and S$3,500, both in the last twenty minutes, to an account you've never seen.
Your stomach drops. You might want to sit very still for a while, call the man back and demand an explanation, or message a friend to ask what to do, and each of those burns time you don't have. The next fifteen minutes, done in the right order, are what count.
This lesson is about those minutes. They won't always get your money back, but they give you the best chance there is.
Scammers don't leave stolen money where it lands. The account your money went to is usually just the first stop, often a money mule's account like the ones you met in lesson 3.3, When a job is really money mule recruitment. From there it's split up and sent onward through other accounts, sometimes within minutes, until it's overseas or turned into something hard to trace.
While the money is still sitting in the first account, a bank has a real chance of stopping it there. Once it's moved two or three times, that chance drops sharply. So the order of your first steps is built around one goal: getting your bank on the case before the money moves again.
That's also why the first call is to your bank, before the police, before changing passwords and before telling family. Lesson 8.2, Report to the police and keep the evidence, and lesson 8.3, Secure your logins and watch for recovery scams, cover the steps that follow, and you'll get to them once the bank is moving.
Every major bank in Singapore runs a 24-hour hotline for fraud and lost cards. Call it immediately. Use the number on the back of your card, from the bank's official website, or the one you saved in your contacts in lesson 2.3. Never use a number from a message or the caller you just spoke to.
If you think your phone itself may be compromised, for example because you installed an app a scammer asked for, make the call from a different phone if you can.
When you get through, say clearly that you've been scammed and that you want to freeze your accounts and cards. Ask them to freeze everything you hold with them, not only the account the money left from. Scammers who've got into one account often have access to others.
Hotlines can be busy, especially late at night or when a scam is spreading widely. If you can't get through quickly, don't sit on hold while money keeps leaving.
Use the emergency freeze in your banking app, the kill switch you located in lesson 7.3, Transfer limits, alerts and the emergency freeze. It blocks your cards and stops digital transactions straight away. You can do it in under a minute, then keep trying the hotline. The freeze stops further losses. The hotline call is still needed so the bank can act on the transfers that have already gone.
If you hold accounts at more than one bank and the scammer may have reached them, freeze each one. Start with the bank that holds the most.
The bank needs details to try to stop the money. The most useful ones are, for each transfer you didn't make or were tricked into making:
the date and time it was made the amount the recipient's account number and bank, or the PayNow details it went to
You'll find these in your transaction history or in the alerts on your phone. Read them out exactly. If there were several transfers, go through each one.
The bank will also want to know what happened, briefly. Was it a call, a message, a link, an app? Did you give anyone a code or log in somewhere? You don't need to tell the whole story at this point. A few sentences are enough for them to act.
Here is an illustration. Back to the 9.40pm call. Elaine, 38, calls her bank's hotline from her husband's phone. "I've just been scammed, so please freeze all my accounts and cards. There are two transfers I didn't authorise: S$4,000 at 9.21pm to an account ending 4417 at another bank, and S$3,500 at 9.33pm to the same account. A man called me pretending to be your fraud team, and I gave him a one-time password." The bank officer freezes her accounts and starts trying to recall the transfers while she's still on the line. Whether the money comes back depends on where it has gone, but Elaine has given the bank everything it needs within ten minutes of noticing.
Before you hang up, ask for a reference number for your report and write it down with the time of the call. You'll need it for the police report and for any follow-up with the bank.
Elaine didn't have to search for what to say. Plenty of people in her place know exactly what happened and still stumble on the phone, because they've never had to put it into words before. You can have yours ready, and the activity is where you'll draft them.
Write the exact words you would say to your bank's hotline after a scam, including the details they will ask for.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).