Begging Scam

From Facebook posted by Farhan Osman:

A warning to all my fellow Singaporeans.

Please be aware of this man.
My friends have met this guy for four times and all of the instances are of the same content of scam.

Recently, a friend met this person at the bus stop outside West Mall. Here are the exact words from my friend. “He suddenly came to the bus stop I was at and he pretended to faint and said he was having an asthma attack and was looking for his asthma inhaler and he lived at Tampines and without it he can’t make his way home as he might pass out anytime.” My friend then decided to call for him an ambulance but he refused.

In another instance, he was inside Tampines MRT station, with the same asthma attack drama and my friend was nice enough to accompany him out of the station to hire a taxi. He then asked my friend for money, but when my friend said he had no money with him, he scolded my friend.

What the person expects you to do is to give him some money for sympathy to take a taxi or to a doctor.

If we don’t do anything, others could possibly get cheated. So please do share.

There are just too many ways scammers can do get money from kind-hearted people.

Former principal found guilty of embezzling school funds

According to Channel News Asia, the former principal of Maris Stella High School, 66-year-old Anthony Tan Kim Hock, has been found guilty of misappropriating S$67,700 from the school's chapel building fund account between March and September 2009.

To find out more, do read http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/former-principal-found-guilty-of-embezzl/650878.html.


We urge the managements of all public sectors, including schools, to make appropriate decisions when it comes to handling of public funds.

Bogus Repairmen

From the Singapore Police Force facebook:

Breaking news:

Police have arrested 3 Malaysians aged 20, 28 and 30 who are believed to be responsible for numerous cases of theft in dwelling at various housing estates island-wide by posing as repairmen or contractors.

The "bogus repairmen" targeted elderly persons, posing as licensed contractors from HDB to gain entry into the victim’s unit on the pretext of checking/repairing pipes and leakages. Upon entering, one of the culprits would engage the victim at the kitchen or toilet while the other culprit searched for cash and valuables in the other rooms of the flat. In the latest case reported on 28 March 2013, an 81-year-old woman living at Toa Payoh fell prey to the "bogus repairmen" who made off with $200 in cash.

Police would like to advise the public to adopt the following measures:

a) Always keep your grille gates locked and never open the doors to strangers;

b) Do not allow anyone who claims to be a repairman to enter your house without verifying his identity;

c) If in doubt, verify his identity with his company, or contact your family members or Police for assistance; and

d) Do not keep large sums of money or valuables in the house. Keep the money in a safe or deposit it in the bank.

Some Fake Tagged Profiles

In the past few months, the number of fake profiles who have posted status in Tagged.com has probably exceeded the number of real ones. However, we have observed some people exposing them directly or indirectly by commenting on the statuses. Sometimes, it's simply humorous.

Anyway, excluding those very obvious scammers who are using foreigners' photos in their fake profiles, we have found some profiles that are using real Singapore girls' photos.

Real owner of photos: Maybeline
http://www.tagged.com/profile.html?uid=5986731523

Real owner of photos: Unknown
http://www.tagged.com/profile.html?uid=5981398712

Real owner of photos: Bella Choi
http://www.tagged.com/profile.html?uid=5980965870

Real owner of photos: Jamie Ang
http://www.tagged.com/profile.html?uid=5987371041

Real owner of photos: Kelly Chin
http://www.tagged.com/profile.html?uid=5984120713

Do help us to report on their profiles - we know Tagged has made it quite tough to report though.

SPCA Dog Adoption Hoax

Someone has spread a false news that SPCA is going to put thousands of dogs to sleep. It results that SPCA's phone lines have been flooded.



From SPCA's Facebook page:

Dear All

We have been informed that there has been a SMS circulating in cyber space that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) will be receiving or have received, a thousand dogs from one of Mutts & Mittens’ tenants and putting them to sleep.

As a result of the hoax message, our telephone lines at our headquarters have been ringing off the hook, putting a halt to our Animal Support Officers answering emergency calls, to the detriment of animals that need our attention the most.

The SPCA categorically denies having received any of these animals.

We will take legal action against those who perpetuate these malicious text messages.

Thank you.

Email Attack from Germany Targeting Yahoo Emails

Happy Valentine's Day to you again. Unfortunately, this time, we are bringing you bad news.

We have detected multiple scam email spamming.



The email comes with no subject and the content includes only an URL. All the URLs are of different domain names but all of them are from Germany with the country code of ".de" just like http://xxx.DE/xxx/xxx. (Singapore's country code is ".sg")

We believe once you click on the URL inside the email, your email account may be compromised as well. Then, the hacker or bot will automatically generate emails with similar URLs to mass send to the email addresses inside your address book or contact list.

We have no idea if your system will be affected. However, so far, all the affected emails are from Yahoo, including yahoo.com and yahoo.com.sg.

If you have received such email from your friend, please notify him/her immediately. The affected person should change the email account's password, notify all his/her friends inside the address book or contact list, then do a full system scan on the system using any anti-virus software.

We would like to remind everyone not to click on any URL from any random email even though the sender is your friend.

Happy Valentine's Day - Find Tagged Fake Profiles

Hey everyone! Happy Valentine's Day!

This entry is a little Valentine's Day present for you as we will be touching up on a simple way to discover some of the fake social network profiles. Of course, this is just a small portion of them.

For Tagged.com (or Facebook) users who have added many "chiobus" in your account, there is a very high possibility that many profiles in your friend list are fake. There are many types of scammers in Tagged.com and luckily, scammers who sign up for additional fake accounts are mainly for the sake of playing the Pets game to increase their Pet values. Apart from that, there are scammers who use fake accounts to spam for their services and websites, including for whatever "swingers' parties". Some fake profiles are more "deadly" since they are used to fool horny guys to show off their private parts in webcam before extorting the lost sheep, while a few are owned by oversized girls who is lack of attention from guys.

We have a Tagged.com account with quite a large number of "female" friends. If you own an account as well, you would know that Tagged.com would give notification if any of your friends' birthdays falls on the current day. Usually, we have ten to twenty friends who have the same birthday on each day but we have a surprise on Valentine's Day.



We actually have 41 friends who have the same birthday and it happens to fall on Valentine's Day, which is so amazing!

This is actually not something very coincident as parents do not specially pick this day to give birth - at least to say, they cannot control the exact birth date. According to our analysis of scammers, 14th February is a good birthday because it gives others a romantic feeling. More guys would send you a message with: "Hey! You're born on Valentine's Day and you must be a very romantic girl!" At least, there will be a much higher chance that they would have such fantasy.

Therefore, if you screen through your Tagged or Facebook account, you may find some suspicious friends. For our Tagged.com account, we have blocked around 10 of them who are obviously created for the Pets game. Tagged.com makes it difficult to remove friends as they do not have a link on individual profile page to do that and thus the easiest approach we can take is to block the scammer while he/she remains in our friends list. As for Facebook, the famous fake profile "Natalia Mmk" and another, "Ling Aiting", which we have yet to expose in this blog do have birthday falling on this romantic day as well.

Catching the fakers by birthday can be applied to those who are "born" on first day of the year as well. Many scammers are lazy to think of a date and thus, they would leave the birthday as 1st January. It is also safer to use this date in case the social network would challenge the user for birthday in order to recover the account in some cases.

However, do take note that there are certainly real people who are born on these days too. If you are in doubt, just initiate a chat with "her" and she will be exposed soon with her real motive if she is a fake account.