SINGAPORE, July 4 — In the ongoing battle against online scams, the authorities might take up insurance to protect Singaporeans from Central Provident Fund (CPF) losses resulting from scams, Manpower Minister Tan See Leng said today (July 4).

He was responding in Parliament to a question from Associate Professor Jamus Lim, a Member of Parliament (MP) for Sengkang Group Representation Constituency (GRC), who had asked if the Government was "considering initiatives along the lines of insurance” for this purpose.

"I mention this in part because as I’m sure he’s aware, in usual banking related frauds, insurance plays a big part in helping to recover fraudulent monies,” said the Workers’ Party MP.

"And in this case, CPF is both a mandatory saving scheme but also is a very, very big supplier, so it may be possible to secure a fairly competitive insurance rate for the purposes of doing this kind of additional protection.”

His question was among several raised by MPs following a recent spate of scams that resulted in some CPF account holders losing their money.

Authorities last month warned about cases where victims were tricked into downloading malware into their phones, which then compromised their mobile devices, resulting in unauthorised transactions from the victims’ bank accounts even though they did not reveal their internet banking credentials, one-time passwords or Singpass credentials to anyone.

In some cases, CPF savings were withdrawn and credited to victims’ bank accounts before being transferred out.

Dr Tan today said that although nine reports were made relating to CPF accounts, the authorities managed to stop the money from being successfully transferred out in one of the cases. The remaining cases involved a net loss of S$124,000 in CPF savings.

The victims of these cases were between the ages of 55 and 80, said Dr Tan.

He added, in response to Prof Lim, that the Government is considering insurance to protect victims against such losses.

"This is under the Shared Responsibility Framework that involves the financial institutions, the telcos and many other participating entities,” he said, referring to a framework announced in February 2022 to outline an equitable way to share liabilities among parties in scam cases.

"There is a plan for a public consultation paper to come up in the third quarter of this year. So I suggest that perhaps at that particular point in time, we can delve deeper into the details.”

Dr Tan said that separately, Singapore’s banks, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), GovTech and the police are also working on initiatives to protect banking customers against unauthorised withdrawals from their bank accounts.

Meanwhile, Dr Tan said an additional facial recognition verification step was introduced last month in light of the recent cases.

"Thus far, we think that it is sufficient to effectively limit convenience in terms of the withdrawal of monies from the CPF accounts to their own bank accounts,” he added.

Explaining the measure further in reply to a supplementary question by Aljunied GRC MP Gerald Giam, Dr Tan said that the measure can ensure the person who is logging in and making withdrawals "actually corresponds to the actual member himself, and not through some scam account”.

Mr Giam, who is also from the Workers’ Party, asked if the scammers in the recent cases were able to obtain victims’ credentials due to vulnerabilities in their devices, and, if so, whether GovTech was working on a patch for it.

Dr Tan clarified that the credentials were stored in the phones and were retrieved by scammers as a result of the malware downloaded by the victims.

"So we have to constantly work at nudging our people, working with one another to keep reminding all of our members, all of our citizens to always be vigilant, and at the same time, the Government will also constantly find new ways to step up our precaution to protect our members,” he said. — TODAY