By Hong Xinyi

AFTER the in-house anti-fraud team at OCBC Bank swung into action, a phone scam hitting its customers was nipped in the bud.

Of the $10,000 in the approximately 100 OCBC accounts they held, only $30 was lost.

It was reported earlier this week that fraudsters masquerading as representatives of Malaysian oil company Petronas have been sending text messages to Singaporeans, congratulating them for winning cash prizes in a Petronas lucky draw and asking them to call a certain number listed in the text message.

When this was done, the callers were asked for their bank account numbers.

The police did not want to comment on whether the account holders of other banks had been targeted in this way, but confirmed that they had received reports and advised members of the public against disclosing their banking details to others.

When OCBC first received calls from suspicious account holders on June 25, the bank said that it activated its Fraud Incident Response Team (Firt), a financial Swat unit partly staffed by former police officers experienced in commercial crimes.

The team then trawled the bank's database to identify 'unique fraud patterns', said Mr Jack Foo, who heads the bank's operational risk-management team, of which Firt is a part.

He told reporters yesterday that this work paid off. Fund-transfer requests for all these accounts were going into one account, a non-OCBC one.

The bank declined to say whether the account was a local or overseas one, citing an ongoing police investigation.

The bank then contacted affected account holders to verify these transactions and temporarily de-activated those accounts whose owners could not be reached.

The $30 fund transfer that went through happened before June 25.

Be on the lookout

SOME 378 people fell prey to various phone scams last year, losing $4.78 million.

Here is how you can protect yourself:

• Do not give away confidential information such as bank account numbers, passwords and personal identification numbers to third parties, even friends and family. That would be like giving away the keys after locking your home.
• Always run independent checks via the official hotlines of the organisations involved, instead of calling numbers listed in an SMS. Most of these scams play on fear or greed.
• Legitimate organisations such as banks never ask for information such as account passwords via e-mail or SMS.