49We've all heard ridiculous stories when it comes to phone scammers. Sometimes, the tale involves someone getting conned out of huge sums of cash, while there have also been cases where to-be victims have managed to reverse-prank the con artists.
Only recently, one Singaporean man managed to do the latter by catching his scam caller completely off guard by simply wearing the right attire at the right time.
The man named Muhammad Asrul (@anaksangku on TikTok) uploaded a video of a live video call he answered, in which he dealt with someone purportedly from the "police force" trying to hound him in an obvious scam job.
The account has since gone private, but you can still watch the video uploaded to YouTube by Mothership.
The scammer had turned on his video camera and immediately told Asrul that he was ringing from the "verification department" of the Singapore Police Force (SPF), and demanded to see his identification card (IC).
The man had been wearing a mask as well as a uniform from the department, and had behind him a backdrop that read "Singapore Police Force".
But already aware of what was happening, Asrul – himself wearing police colors and a badge – flippantly answered "Is it?".
It wasn't long before Asrul's attire caught the scammer's eye, who then quickly shut off his camera for fear of getting caught.
Asrul pushed on by asking the scammer "You see what I'm wearing right now?", to which the guy on the other end answered "Oh motherfucker! What are you talking about?".
Another query by Asrul went unanswered, before the scammer answered with the most ridiculous reply – "I love you, sir!"
"Love me, sir?" Asrul pressed again, before receiving the reply "Yes my brother, I love you."
"Oh, now 'my brother'?" Asrul demanded.
"Yes, my brother.." came the final reply before the video ended, with the scammer completely failing at his task to carry out a con.
Funnily enough, Asrul's police outfit was itself wasn't real – in a follow-up video, he explained that he'd served his National Service term under the Singapore police, and that he'd only happened to be wearing the outfit when the call came in.
"I only wanted to take the opportunity to show them that they're messing with the wrong people, especially Singaporeans," he said. "I had no intentions to impersonate a police officer, but only to create awareness."
While the whole situation itself may have been pretty comical, data has shown that Singporeans have lost incredible sums of money to scammers trying out various tactics, ranging from impersonating police officers to bank hotline spoofs.
In 2020 alone, over S$201 million was lost by victims to scammers using the most common methods, with the Singaporean police citing increased online transactions as a major factor. In January 2022, the police announced that nearly SG$500 million (US$370 million) was lost to fake bank hotlines, with 15 cases already having been reported since December 2021.
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Cover image sourced from @anaksangku on TikTok via Mothership.
