Don't fall for it: Police say scammers are requesting crypto transfers 'for security'

Cryptocurrency investors, be careful if you receive e-mails or messages asking you to transfer virtual assets through another crypto wallet for security or investigation purposes.

The police said on July 3 that there have been at least 31 such reported cases since May.

In the scam cases, victims would receive an e-mail or SMS text messages from scammers who claim to be from cryptocurrency platforms like Binance and Coinhako.

The victims would be told that there are fraudulent activities, such as suspicious logins or withdrawal requests, on their accounts.

They would then be asked to contact a customer support hotline to rectify the issues. The hotline number usually began with +65 3159. After calling the hotline, victims would be guided to download the Trust application on their mobile devices to set up a Trust Wallet.

In some cases, victims would receive WhatsApp calls from numbers beginning with the prefixes +44, +61 or +66, the country codes for the UK, Australia and Thailand respectively. Through WhatsApp's screen-sharing function, the scammer would guide the victim with setting up the wallet.

Victims would then be told to transfer their virtual assets to the new wallet for security purposes, and to reveal their login details.

The victims would realise that they had been scammed only when the conmen became uncontactable or asked for more transfers, said the police.

Licensed crypto platforms in Singapore will never instruct users to transfer their virtual assets to another crypto wallet or account for security or investigation purposes, the police added.

These platforms will also never request for users' login details, including recovery phrases.

The public should protect themselves from such scammers through actions such as setting lower transaction limits, and lower transaction thresholds that would trigger notifications to the user.

Those who suspect that they may be a victim of cryptocurrency-related crimes should contact their cryptocurrency exchange to halt further transactions or freeze their account.

They should also review and cancel any suspicious token approvals, and report the issue to the police.

They should also report fraudulent crypto phishing websites to the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore's SingCERT at singcert@csa.gov.sg or via the incident reporting form at https://www.csa.gov.sg/singcert/reporting