The firm thought that it was receiving an order from Nanyang Technological University when it got an email from a Daniel Chong on July 18.
It was only when Bernard Chan, 44, director of Penanshin Air Express, informed him that the purchase order was fake that N.P. realised he had fallen victim to a business email compromise scam. Between January and June, there were 209 cases of BEC scams reported, with S$67.7mil lost, the police said.
But when the scammer informed Chan that he would arrange for a courier to pick up and ship the laptops to Britain, the Penanshin Air Express director realised it was a scam. N.P. said: “We should have checked the location before shipping out the laptops. It does not make sense for a university to ask us to send laptops it is ordering to the United Kingdom, or even to another location in Singapore.The police said that investigations are ongoing.
Evelyn Chow, managing director of human resources consultancy DecodeHR, said that due to the pandemic, many employees work from home.