Nope, this is not spelling mistake.

Vishing is the criminal practice of using social engineering and Voice over IP (VoIP) to gain access to private personal and financial information from the public for the purpose of financial reward. To know more about it, you may want to read up this Wikipedia article here. (You may also want to refer to some of these examples: [1], [2], [3].)

To be frank, I wasn’t really aware of Vshing until I read APLINK’s article. The closest thing to Vishing I have experienced, is when Headhunters impersonate as a staff from an overseas office asking for phone numbers or email address who are from the same mailing list.

The usual scenario goes like this: Someone will call claiming they are on a business trip or vacation, and they are having some computer problems which prevented them from accessing the company network via VPN. But the matter is important or urgent and they need to know the numbers to call certain people, or to send them an important and updated spreadsheet / presentation via their own private email account in Hotmail or Gmail.

I have developed a way to frustrate these people by asking them to go through a verification process which requires them to provide certain personal information, for e.g. their immediate line managers, their corporate-issued mobile number (for call back verification), the last 4 digits of their employee number and, on a good day we feel particularly charitable to the International Red Cross, their credit card numbers. Usually, by then they either realise they are getting nowhere and hang up in anger, or they realised they are so thoroughly busted they just hang up.

Anyway, the other thing that reminds me of Vishing in Singapore, would be cases of ‘High Court Officials’ – or was it ‘officers from the Commercial Crimes Department [CCD]’ ? – calling one up to say that one’s account is going to be frozen by the government gahmen due to some ongoing criminal investigation. My understanding is that they will then ask for the person to transfer money to a holding account’

Another one would be someone impersonating as officials from even the CPF Board, calling up to advise the victim to transfer their GST Rebates to a certain account number, as it part of the CPF’s services to automatically remit that money to their account.

Frankly, do not trust any form of communications whereby you are unable to verify the source. Even if they give you a call-back number, it is not to be trusted. The best thing to do would be, as APLINK advised, to trust only the number you already know – for e.g. for credit cards, the number you find at the back of your card, or in the case of gahmen departments, the numbers listed on the .gov.sg websites.

In summary, don’t panic and stay calm. Don’t jump the gun and never do what those people tell you right away.

After all, if what those people are saying is true, whatever bad things that is happening to your account cannot be averted. In fact, tell them you will come down personally to whatever department they say they are calling from to meet them and pass them the information. Insist that you want this to be done for good order sake. And if they threatens you, then all the more you should meet them, insisting that you are trying to do your part as a good citizen.

If they refused or gave you excuses that this is unnecessary, just hang up. After all, if they are indeed gahmen officials, why should they be afraid of you going over to meet them, at your own expense and your own inconvenience?