Migrant maids from Sri Lanka at risk of being duped in Singapore
Migrant maids from Sri Lanka are at risk of being duped in Singapore with the country’s Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam saying that as many as 500 migrant maids working in Singapore fell victim to scams last year.
He said this was an increase of 18 per cent from the 423 cases of duping reported in 2022.
Most of the domestic workers in Singapore come from India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asian countries.
Responding to a question in Parliament on Wednesday, Shanmugam said that agencies regularly carry out anti-scam education efforts for workers employed in Singapore, the PTI news agency reported.
As many as 500 migrant maids fell victim to scams in 2023. It is 18 per cent increase from the 423 duping cases reported in 2022, he told the Parliament.
As part of the Ministry of Manpower’s mandatory settling-in programme, workers are taught measures that they can adopt to protect themselves from scams, Shanmugam said in a written reply to a question on raising workers’ awareness in such cases.
“They are educated on the latest scam trends, so that they are equipped to detect scams and become advocates for scam prevention within their own community,” The Straits Times quoted Shanmugam as responding to the question in the house.
According to the annual scams statistics for 2023, the number of scam cases here hit a record high, with a total of 46,563 cases reported. Over SGD651 million was lost that year, and more than SGD2.3 billion has been lost to scams since 2019.
The top three types of scams which foreign maids fell for in 2021 were phishing, Internet love and loan scams, the Police had said.
The Police also run the Domestic Guardians Programme, which trains migrant domestic workers on how to prevent common crimes such as housebreaking, trespassing, and scams.
In 2022, 357 domestic (foreign) workers fell prey to scams in 2021, a rise from the 216 victims in 2020, according to a report by the broadsheet, PTI reported. (Colombo Gazette)
