SINGAPORE, Aug 31 — The number of crimes reported in Singapore in the first half of this year rose 11.2 per cent from the same period a year ago, mainly driven by a 16 per cent rise in scams that took advantage of people’s anxieties during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Singapore Police Force said yesterday.

There was also a big jump in outrage of modesty cases, up 38.6 per cent from the same period last year, though it was just slightly higher than 2019, before the pandemic.

At the same time, the number of robbery, housebreaking and snatch theft cases dropped sharply by 40.5 per cent to 75 cases in the first six months of this year, the lowest in a decade. 

In all, 19,444 crimes were reported for the first half of the year, up from 17,492 in the same period last year.

The police said that the increase this year was partly due to the low base in the same period last year, which included the circuit breaker period from April 7 to June 1 when people’s movements and non-essential activities were halted, so incidents of most types of crimes fell.

Scams continue to rise

Of the total 19,444 crimes reported between January and July this year, 8,403 were scam-related cases, up from 7,247 in the same period last year.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Aileen Yap, the assistant director of the police’s anti-scam division, said last Friday at a press briefing ahead of the release of the crime statistics that since the Anti-Scam Centre was formed in June 2019, it has handled reports involving losses totalling more than S$377 million.

The Anti-Scam Centre, working with banks, has frozen more than 17,000 bank accounts and recovered about S$127 million, or about 34 per cent of the total amount lost to scams, she said.

During the press briefing, the police said that scammers tended to capitalise on the sentiment of the day.

For instance, Madam Carolyn Misir, the principal psychologist of the Police Psychological Services Department, noted that in the early days of the pandemic, many consumers rushed to buy face masks and hand sanitisers, which correspondingly led to many e-commerce scams that sought to cash in on this trend. 

Then, as the economic toll of the pandemic began to manifest itself in more retrenchments and business failures, what started proliferating were loan, investment and job scams, she added.

The following is a breakdown of some of the scams and other crimes that the police highlighted in its report.

Loan scams