The Evolution of Modern Scams: Trends and Prevention Tips

The Evolution of Modern Scams: Trends and Prevention Tips

 

When asked to think about a con artist, swindlers and thieves in busy streets may come to mind. However, in this digital age, the busy streets have become more frequent digital spaces, such as social media. Throughout history, humans have been susceptible to deception by con artists and scammers. At the root of all scams, fraudsters target victims emotionally, from greed to fear and urgency. 

 

Scams are not new to us, from classic cons such as fake lottery tickets to the newer and modern AI fraud. Scam methods have evolved greatly, especially with the advent of technology, and they are becoming harder to spot. Nowadays, scams thrive on digital platforms and use advanced social engineering techniques to cheat people out of their money or their personal details. In this article, we will trace the evolution of scams in Singapore and around the world, and show how understanding them is crucial to keep you and your loved ones safe. 

 

In Singapore, it was recently reported by the Singapore Police Force that more than S$1.1 billion was lost to scams in 2024. Globally, these numbers are a lot higher. But, before we explore the scams that terrorise us now, it is important to also know how it began. 

 

The Foundation of Deception

 

The earliest recorded case of fraud happened in 300 BC. A Greek sea merchant, Hegestratos, took out an insurance policy on his ship and cargo. The policy allowed merchants to borrow money with the agreement to pay it back with interest once the cargo was delivered. Hegestratos instead sank his empty ship to pocket all the loaned money. However, he was caught sinking his ship and drowned in his attempt to escape.

 

Before widespread internet use, scams operated physically. Confidence tricks were a main form of scam in the early days. A confidence trick is known as a deceptive scheme that involves gaining someone’s trust before defrauding them. These scams aim to exploit victims by manipulating their naivety, greed or compassion.

 

One famous example is the three-card monte, also commonly known as find the lady. In this game, a dealer will move three cards around a table, trying to trick the player into guessing the wrong card. Usually, there will be two black cards and one red queen. The goal is for the player to keep their eye on the money card (the queen) before placing their bets on the card they think is the queen as the dealer moves the cards around the table. 

 

However, the three-card monte is rigged for the players to lose. The dealer will initially fool victims with sneaky hand movements, as well as help from their friends acting as if they managed to win such a bet. The players will find it hard to stop playing until they have lost a large sum of money. By letting players win early on, the scammers manage to hook onto the victims’ greed. This is a common form of scam tactic that is still used today. 

 

In the 1920s, the Ponzi scheme emerged. This scheme was named after Charles Ponzi, who duped people into investing in a postage stamp scheme at that time. This scheme promised easy profit for investors. However, behind the scenes, funds from new investors were being used to pay earlier ones, creating the illusion of profitability. But once new investments slow down, the scheme inevitably collapses, leaving most participants with significant losses.

 

Despite this learning experience, history repeated itself 80 years later. Bernie Madoff, an American financier, executed the largest Ponzi scheme in history, scamming thousands of investors out of an estimated 65 billion over 17 years. Madoff deposited client funds into a single bank account, which he used to pay existing clients who wanted to cash out. He funded the redemptions by attracting new investors. Inevitably, the scheme collapsed in 2008 when the market turned sharply lower and too many clients wanted to withdraw their money. 

 

This underscores how scams have evolved into the modern world, just by changing the commodity but not the con. Despite knowledge of the past, people remain susceptible to old tricks disguised in new forms. 

The Dawn of the Digital Era

 

As the internet came into play, there came new avenues for scammers to practice old tricks. The internet brought us great convenience, but it brought about an increase in scalability and anonymity for scammers. 

 

The Nigerian Prince scam is one of the earliest phishing scams recorded. They are also known as advance fee fraud or 419 fraud. Victims will receive emails from allegedly wronged and robbed Nigerian nobility, who told tragic tales and requested financial aid. The scammers will promise great wealth in return for helping them out with their supposed funds. The scammers will then disappear with the money once it is transferred. The key element of every story is to get victims to believe that the vast riches belonging to the person who approached them can also belong to themselves. This scam was so widespread that scammers were able to mass-forward such emails to people. 

 

The ease of spreading information also led to the spread of malware across the digital space. The ILOVEYOU virus, released on May 4 2000, was one of the most destructive forms of malware that affected millions of computers. It spread primarily through email, disguised as a “love letter”, which enticed users to open the attachment that triggered the infection. Once a system was infected, ILOVEYOU would send copies of itself through a victim’s Microsoft Outlook address book, leading to widespread chaos. The creator, Onel de Guzman, created the malware to steal the internet login details of victims. This malware became the turning point in the history of cybersecurity and showed how scams evolve through time. 

 

Learn what to do if you download a malicious application.

 

The Social Media Revolution

 

As technology became more advanced, social media became part of people’s lives. People document their lives and keep their personal information online, almost like a virtual diary. Scammers lick their lips at the sound of this. 

 

The explosion of social media happened around the mid-2000s. By 2012, Facebook became the most used social media application in the world, with over a billion users. Social media scam crime has also become widespread. The most common kinds include impersonation scams, romance scams or malware links. 

 

Impersonation scams on social media happen when scammers pretend to be someone you know, like a friend, family member or celebrity. They may request money or personal information in the name of the person. A more recent case of social media impersonation reported by the Singapore Police Force perfectly describes the dangers of such scams. 

 

It was reported that in the first half of 2024, more than 120 people lost at least S$330,000 to social media impersonation scams. Victims were approached on social media platforms with the pretext of joining or voting in campaigns allegedly organised by local brands. The victims were instructed to provide the scammers with their phone numbers and/or one-time passwords (OTPs). The scammers were then able to approve transactions from the victims’ linked bank accounts and cards to their own bank accounts. Some victims may even lose access to their social media accounts after giving away OTPs meant to reset their passwords. The victims’ social media accounts were then taken over by scammers to target their relatives or friends. Apart from requests for phone numbers and OTPs, victims may be asked for their debit or credit card details or internet banking credentials. Victims will typically receive a link leading them to a spoofed website bearing the DBS bank logo, tricking them into disclosing their bank credentials. 

 

Romance scams happen on social media as well. There is evidence of romance scam dating as far back as the sixteenth century, according to ResearchGate. But, the advent of social media has facilitated such scams to another level. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance ranks romance scams as the seventh most common fraud scheme. However, the true incidence is much higher, as most victims might not report the crime. 

 

During a panel discussion of an anti-scam event in November 2024, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Singapore Anti-Scam Command, Aileen Yap, recounted a case of love fraud. A Singaporean mother of three was so in love with a man she met online that she surrendered S$200,000 in insurance policies and divorced her husband in an attempt to be with him. The scammer claimed to be a military doctor from the United States who needed money to pay his hospital bills after getting shot on a mission to South Sudan. The impact of such a love scam is huge and can greatly affect those around the victim. 

The Financialisation of Scams: Crypto and Investment Fraud

 

There is a significant shift towards complex financial scams today, especially with emerging technologies such as cryptocurrency. Scammers are finding more creative and elusive ways to trick victims without getting caught. They aim to find loopholes in new financial technologies and popular investment trends that they can exploit. 

 

One way that scammers make use of cryptocurrency as a scam is a pump-and-dump scheme. Scammers hype up a cheap, low-value asset, usually a penny stock or little-known cryptocurrency, in a pump-and-dump scheme. As more investors rush in, the value of the asset rises. The scammers then dump their shares or tokens at the peak of the asset’s price while unsuspecting investors are left holding worthless assets when its price inevitably crashes. In the height of the popular Netflix show Squid Game in November 2021, scammers released a digital token inspired by it, known as the Squid Coin. The coin quickly gained popularity, but concerns began to surface. Investors who bought into the cryptocurrency soon realised that they were unable to sell their tokens. Then, the Squid Coin’s value plummeted to zero, leaving most investors with worthless tokens. It became apparent that the coin’s developers had quickly cashed out their holdings, draining liquidity from the exchange. This is a classic example of a pump-and-dump crypto scam that scammers use to take advantage of the crypto boom. 

 

Pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes are classic scam tactics in investment scams. Scammers rely on continuous recruitment to be able to pay current investors and maintain the illusion of profitability. Although pyramid and Ponzi schemes are synonymous, they have slight differences, mainly: 

 

• Pyramid schemes do not last as long as Ponzi schemes. Pyramid schemes focus on a steady inflow of new investors, while Ponzi schemes also aim to retain the old ones.

 

• Pyramid schemes require “investors” to bring in new people, and they will receive a commission from each of the new people. Ponzi schemes however, use the funds received to pay the profits of earlier investors. 

 

• Ponzi schemes are open fraud, while pyramid schemes can sometimes be part of a legitimate business. 

 

In most investment fraud cases, scammers will act as fake gurus or influencers to promote those schemes. This gives the investment scam the illusion of authenticity, helping to gather more investors. Investment scams like these are easily widespread, as they can be promoted through social media or the digital space. There is also greater difficulty in tracing the funds as the transactions are global, making it difficult for law enforcement to pinpoint the exact locations of sources and destinations. 

The Future of Deception: The AI and the Automation Era

 

As technology continues to improve, scammers are finding new ways to employ it to their benefit. They are able to make scams harder to detect and trace for law enforcement. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have been commonly used in scamming tactics. Examples include deepfakes and AI-generated phishing emails or texts. Scams are now more realistic, personalised and widespread, without scammers being required to control things themselves. 

 

In impersonation scams, scammers can use images and videos found on social media to create realistic deepfakes of a victim’s friend or loved one. In the following case, scammers impersonated a senior executive of a company to steal money from the company. On April 7 2025, the Singapore Police Force published an advisory to guard against deepfake scams that pose as senior executives of a company. According to the SPF, they managed to recover around S$670,000 that was lost to this variant of impersonation scam. 

 

In summary, the victim, a financial director for a company, was contacted on WhatsApp by a scammer impersonating the company’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO). The director was subsequently told to join a Zoom meeting with whom he thought was the company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), among others. They were all impersonated with deepfake technology. Through the meeting, the victim was instructed and subsequently performed a transaction of USD 499,000 to a money mule account. 

 

It is clear how scammers have evolved through the years to prey on victims to steal their money and/or information. From the early beginnings of fraud, where cases began in person, to the current age, where scams can happen worldwide, scams are becoming more widespread. Scams are becoming more elusive as well as scammers develop new tactics to keep themselves from being caught or spotted. 

 

At the end, it is still up to us to keep ourselves safe from the dangers of scams. Knowing how to spot and avoid scams is the best way to keep us and our loved ones safe. In the next articles, we will discover how we can keep ourselves safe from the scams that plague our world. Discover other scam prevention tips and tricks, as well as the different types of scams in Singapore, with Scam.SG!