Cannot make up your mind about an issue? Strip away the context; remove the adjectives and details. What’s your opinion about the barebone facts? If your judgment changes once the specifics are reconsidered, why? Because of a bias that ought to be jettisoned? It’s almost certainly an unhealthy sign when one’s opinion changes after ethnicity, nationality, or gender is reintroduced. Or is it an issue over which context actually does matter?
Consider the matter 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 overreach; governments shouldn’t have the power to stop you from making a bad financial decision. Now, let’s add that the country in question is Singapore, a very competent but undemocratic or censorious state. Granted, I’d trust the Singaporean police to manage my bank accounts more than, say, the Cambodian and Burmese police, yet it still seems unwarranted state intrusion.
Now include the reason for this: to stop people from becoming victims of cyber scammers. I admit, the final piece stumps me. Scam losses in Singapore reportedly increased by 40 percent in 2024 compared to 2023, when they were worth $475 million. In the first half of 2024, the figure was $283 million. Even in the wealthy city-state, such losses cannot be chalked off. Moreover, according to the Singaporean police’s Mid-Year Scams and Cybercrime Brief 2024 report, 86 percent of reported scams “involved mostly self-effected transfers,” meaning the victim directly paid money to the scammer rather than the scammer gaining direct access to the victim’s bank account.
This gives some credence to the Protection From Scams Bill, passed by parliament on January 7, which will allow the police to impose “restriction orders” on individuals who are likely targeted by cyber scammers but who refuse to acknowledge it. As Nikkei Asia explained, the police will direct the person’s bank not to execute any transactions from their account and not to allow any draw-down of credit facilities. Access to their account, ATMs, and credit facilities will be suspended. The apparent victim will still be able to draw funds for living expenses, although this will require them to make an application to be approved by authorities to access money for daily living, medical bills, or insurance premiums. The restriction will be limited at first to a maximum of 30 days, although this can be extended for five more periods, so for about five months.
This will only be used as a “last resort” when all efforts to convince the soon-to-be victim that a scammer is actually duping them have failed, says Minister of State for Home Affairs Sun Xueling. However, this was reportedly a last-minute concession after parliamentary opposition, suggesting the government originally wanted the police to have further-reaching powers. The latest law comes after the equally controversial Online Criminal Harms Act of 2023 that allows the state to remove online content suspected of “provoking” a crime. That was more clearly a concern for civil liberties than the Protection from Scams Bill.
Yet is it the state’s right to prevent someone from making a poor financial decision? Indeed, should the government mediate to prevent the consequences of stupidity, egoism, or ignorance? Scammers certainly prey on these things, but they also prey on at-risk people, including the elderly. According to the Singaporean police’s aforementioned report from 2024, over-65s account for just 7.2 percent of scam victims, but the “average amount lost per elderly victim [to scams] is the highest when compared to victims of the other age groups.”
But couldn’t the same logic also be applied to poor choices in stocks or gambling? If a man is determined to invest in a terrible property development that’s obviously going to lose money, much to his wife and family’s consternation, should the police intervene to stop him? The obvious retort is that there’s nothing inherently illegal about a company offering unprofitable stocks or an elderly Singaporean traveling abroad and gambling away their children’s inheritance. In contrast, scamming is illegal from start to finish. Even if your chances of not losing money at a casino are just 5 percent, with scammers, it’s always zero percent.
I’m still agnostic on the morality of the Protection From Scams Bill, although there are some obvious practical flaws. If someone cannot be convinced after five months that they’re being conned, at which point the police presumably cannot intervene any longer, surely they will be as easily tricked in month six. Also, the entire endeavor depends on someone other than the victim making the police aware of a potential scam, so the authorities are unlikely to help the most vulnerable people. More to the point, even if Singapore’s police can prevent one crime, they’re very unlikely to stop the scammer from ripping off other people. After all, as the police’s Mid-Year Scams and Cybercrime Brief 2024 report noted, “most online scams are perpetrated by scammers based outside of Singapore and such cases are difficult to investigate and prosecute.”
The city-state (regrettably) executes people who traffic drugs, but cyber scamming is a wholly new form of transnational crime. The crook can sit in Sihanoukville in Cambodia or the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Laos and never set foot in the city-state, yet still cheat Singaporeans out of their savings. Since the Singaporean police cannot do much to stop the crime at source in another country, the response must have a political and diplomatic dimension. Yet that comes up against the regional sine non qua of non-interference in another country’s affairs. I’d 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 must wake up to the fact that the scam industry, which is perhaps worth as much as 30-40 percent of the formal economies of some mainland Southeast Asian countries, is an existential threat to regional stability. Cambodia is on its way to becoming a “scam state” that, like Latin America’s “narco states,” exports its sins to its neighbors.
The likes of Singapore must apply some real pressure that may look like interference on the governments of Cambodia, Myanmar, and other nations. But where’s the public criticism? Where are the threats of what will happen if Cambodia and Laos’ ruling elites or Myanmar’s junta keep on protecting the scammers? The average Singaporean is personally unaffected when the Phnom Penh government destroys its political opposition movement and represses its citizens. Yet the average Singaporean is personally affected when the Phnom Penh regime refuses to tackle the country’s cyber scam industry and grows fat off the proceeds. If one hasn’t noticed, the cyber scam industry is already reshaping regional politics. Arguably, the course of the Myanmar civil war turned in 2023 after Beijing intervened to see whether the junta or the ethnic militias could be tougher on the scammers, precipitating the consequential Operation 1027 offensive.
The Singaporean government says its foreign policy is always based on “national interests.” Yet we have a situation in which the state is getting far-reaching powers to intervene in the financial affairs of its own citizens to prevent a crime. But the government isn’t prepared to intervene a little more in the affairs of another country to tackle the perpetrators of that crime. A nanny at home but an indolent aunt abroad. The Singaporean public should demand actual protection from scammers, but that might mean breaking the region’s principal taboo.
