She also asked Yang why she received no notification from UOB – where she had a genuine account – if her ID was used to open another.
Yang said that Serena, being a branch manager, had a way to “hide” the bank account.
Jane told reporters she still had her doubts on that first day. It was only after “a lot of conversation” with Yang over subsequent days, with him checking on her schedule, that slowly convinced her he was truly investigating the case.
The fake inspector then gave her a letter which said she could be detained for 60 days for money laundering. He also warned her against tipping off or sharing information about this with third parties.
And Jane did as she was told. During this time, she was also dealing with the death of a family member, on top of feeling under the weather and being overloaded with work.
“I (was) not in the state of mind to decide anything … So like, whatever you want, I just give it to you … You don’t come and disturb me.”
“HE MADE ME BELIEVE”
Yang’s next step was to redirect Jane to his “senior officer” to apply for a “priority financial inspection”.
This has been revealed as a common method used by scammers to get victims to transfer money to a given account.
Wanting to avoid getting detained, Jane followed Yang’s instructions. She withdrew S$500,000 from her savings and put it in a new account opened at a Chinese bank.
The “senior officer”, who went by “Inspector Chong”, told her they needed her help to trap banking insiders like Serena.
“He made me believe … that I’m helping the police.”
Over Dec 18 and Dec 19, Jane made nine bank transfers from the Chinese bank account to the scammers, each time just under S$20,000.
The scammers told her these were “dummy” payments to draw Serena out, and that her actual funds would not be affected.
At this stage, the real ASC was alerted.
But Chong was already one step ahead, having warned her the ASC would call to inform her about a potential scam. He instructed Jane to tell the ASC officers that she knew what she was doing; and that she didn’t have to tell them the truth as she was already helping the “police”.
When the real ASC called – and repeated what Chong said they would – that was all the convincing Jane needed.
“I don’t know why they said exactly what he said. (It) made me believe what he said.”
