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Can’t make a decision about a problem? Take away the context; remove the adjectives and details. What is your opinion about the bare facts? If your judgment changes once the details are revisited, why? Because of a prejudice that needs to be thrown overboard? It is almost certainly an unhealthy sign if someone’s opinion changes after ethnicity, nationality or gender is reintroduced. Or is it a matter of which context? Actually does it matter?
Think about the issue at hand. A government will allow the police to forcibly take control of a citizen’s bank account to prevent them from losing money. Whether it is the United States, Norway or China, this appears to be a case of state supremacy; governments should not have the power to stop you from making a bad financial decision. Now let’s add that the country in question is Singapore, a highly competent but undemocratic or censorious state. Granted, I trust the Singaporean police to manage my bank accounts more than, say, the Cambodian and Burmese police, but it still seems like unwarranted state interference.
Now add the reason for this: to prevent people from falling victim to cyber scammers. I admit that the last part baffles me. Losses from scams in Singapore are reported to have increased by 40 percent in 2024 compared to 2023, when they were worth US$475 million. In the first half of 2024, the figure amounted to $283 million. Even in the rich city-state, such losses cannot be offset. Additionally, according to the Singapore Police Force’s Mid-Year Scams and Cybercrime Brief 2024 report, 86 percent of reported scams were “mainly self-executed transfers,” meaning the victim paid money directly to the scammer rather than the scammer directly gained access to the victim’s data. bank account.
This lends some credibility to the Protection from Scams Bill, passed by Parliament on January 7, which will allow police to impose “restriction orders” on those likely to be targeted by cyber scammers but who refuse to do so to acknowledge. Like Nikkei Asia explainedthe police will instruct the person’s bank not to make any transactions from his account and not to allow withdrawals from credit facilities. Access to their accounts, ATMs and credit facilities will be suspended. The apparent victim will still be able to withdraw money for living expenses, although he will have to apply to be approved by authorities to access money for daily living expenses, medical bills or insurance premiums. The restriction will initially be limited to a maximum of 30 days, but can be extended for another five terms, i.e. approximately five months.
This will only be used as a “last resort” when all attempts to convince the would-be victim that a scammer is actually fooling them have failed. say Minister of State for the Interior Sun Xueling. However, this was reportedly a last-minute concession after parliamentary opposition, suggesting that the government originally wanted the police to be given more far-reaching powers. The latest law comes after the equally controversial Online Criminal Harms Act of 2023, which allows the state to remove online content suspected of “provoking” a crime. That was clearer A concern for civil liberties than the Protection from Scams Bill.
But is it the state’s right to prevent someone from making a bad financial decision? Should the government indeed intervene to prevent the consequences of stupidity, selfishness or ignorance? Scammers certainly prey on these things, but they also prey on people who are at risk, including the elderly. According to the aforementioned 2024 Singapore Police Force report, those over 65 make up only 7.2 percent of scam victims, but the “average amount lost per older victim [to scams] is the highest compared to victims of the other age groups.”
But couldn’t the same logic also be applied to bad stock or gambling choices? If a man is determined to invest in a terrible real estate project that will obviously cost money, much to the dismay of his wife and family, should the police step in to stop him? The obvious answer is that there is nothing inherently illegal about a company offering unprofitable shares, or an elderly Singaporean traveling abroad and gambling away his children’s inheritance. Scams, on the other hand, are illegal from start to finish. Even though the chance that you will not lose money at a casino is only 5 percent, with scammers it is always zero percent.
I remain agnostic about the morality of the Fraud Protection Act, although there are some obvious practical shortcomings. If a person cannot be convinced that he is being scammed after five months, and the police are unlikely to be able to intervene at that point, he will certainly be fooled just as easily in month six. Furthermore, the entire enterprise depends on someone other than the victim notifying the police of a possible scam, making it unlikely that authorities will help the most vulnerable people. In fact, even if the Singapore Police Force can prevent one crime, it is highly unlikely that it will stop the scammer from scamming other people. After all, as the police’s Mid-Year Scams and Cybercrime Brief 2024 report notes, “most online scams are perpetrated by scammers based outside Singapore, and such cases are difficult to investigate and prosecute.”
The city-state (unfortunately) executes people who traffic drugs, but cyber scams are a whole new form of cross-border crime. The crook could be in Sihanoukville in Cambodia or the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Laos and never set foot in the city-state, but still defraud Singaporeans of their savings. Since Singaporean police cannot do much in another country to stop crime at its source, the response must have a political and diplomatic dimension. Yet this conflicts with the regional sine non qua of non-interference in the affairs of another country. I would say it is becoming redundant in this new era.
I argued here last month that the cyber scam industry is becoming an “incurable disease” in countries like Cambodia and Myanmar. But the rest of Southeast Asia needs to wake up to the fact that it may be a scam worth As many as 30 to 40 percent of the formal economies of some countries in mainland Southeast Asia pose an existential threat to regional stability. Cambodia is on its way to becoming a “scam state” that, like the “narco states” of Latin America, exports its sins to its neighbors.
People like Singapore need to exert real pressure akin to interference on the governments of Cambodia, Myanmar and other countries. But where is the public criticism? Where are the threats of what will happen if the ruling elites of Cambodia and Laos or the junta of Myanmar continue to protect the scammers? The average Singaporean is not personally bothered when the government in Phnom Penh destroys its political opposition movement and oppresses its citizens. Still the average Singaporean is personally affected when the regime in Phnom Penh refuses to tackle the country’s cyber scam industry and grows fat from the proceeds. If you haven’t noticed yet, the cyber scam industry is already reshaping regional politics. It is likely that the course of Myanmar’s civil war changed in 2023 after Beijing intervened to see if the junta or ethnic militias could crack down on the hustlers, precipitating the subsequent Operation 1027 offensive.
The Singaporean government says its foreign policy has always been based on “national interests”. Yet we are faced with a situation in which the state is given far-reaching powers to intervene in the financial affairs of its own citizens in order to prevent a crime. But the government is not willing to intervene more in the affairs of another country to deal with the perpetrators of that crime. A babysitter at home, but a lazy aunt abroad. The Singaporean public should demand real protection from scammers, but that could mean breaking the region’s most important taboo.