One spammed me with stickers before blocking me. The moment I revealed myself over a phone call, Chong abruptly hung up and blocked my number. I was also booted out of the chat group. Yes, I had to confess to Chong that I had been leading him on this whole time and I was a journalist. So despite Chong urging me to keep going, I simply stopped.Īt this point, it was time for the truth to come out. I was concerned about losing money to these scammers or, worse, exposing my real phone number to them if I made a PayNow fund transfer. One of them, identifying himself as Xing, even sent me personal messages initiating small talk.Īfter that training session, I started my own account on the website that was already preloaded with about S$70 and began carrying out a task, but my balance fell into negative territory on the 34th mission and I could not continue "working" until I topped it up.Īt this point, the site showed that I had chalked up a commission of S$10.36 so far, but that my account balance had a deficit of S$21.85. In the meantime, Chong added me into a WhatsApp chat group with other “agents” who shared screenshots of their supposed earnings. I began replying to these "ads" expressing interest in their "job offers". One even claimed to be offering part-time employment at our own company, Mediacorp. Some of us had received messages from "recruiters" claiming to be hiring on behalf of companies such as Lazada, Shopee, YouTube and TikTok. On Wednesday (Jan 19), DBS bank issued an alert about SMS phishing scams after a screenshot of a message received by a customer about the "suspension" of his account was circulated online.Īnd so, TODAY decided to take a closer look at how these scammers operate by responding to some of the job scam text messages that plenty of us in the newsroom had received recently.
More recently, bank-related phishing scams became the talk of town after an SMS phishing scam affected at least 469 OCBC customers, with losses totalling at least S$8.5 million. Police reports of job scams jumped by more than 16 times in the first half of last year compared with the same period in 2020. These text messages are purveyors of the job scam: They lure people with seemingly well-paying and easy jobs, only to end up taking money from these victims. These days, I have been getting quite a lot of attractive-sounding job offers on my text messaging platforms, as I am sure you have, too.Īnd of course, I know they are indeed too good to be true. SINGAPORE - It sounded too good to be true: Last week, a recruiter texted me out of the blue to ask if I wanted a part-time job at TikTok paying S$200 a day to help "increase the exposure of bloggers".īut he was not the first headhunter to contact me about a lucrative job without my even looking for one.
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