Alert SingPost employee foils Nigerian scam

Mdm Rohana Sarmani wasn’t fooled by the scam email.

SEEING an email from her "brother" at 7.45am titled "Urgent please!" jolted her.

Ms Janet, 52, skimmed through the letter and was shocked: Her younger brother, 49, who was supposed to be working in Australia, had apparently been robbed in Lagos, Nigeria.

"I love this brother and I was really worried about him," the Filipino engineer told Today.

The letter, sent from her brother's email account on Monday, claimed he had lost all his money, his credit cards and mobile phone, and urgently needed a £1,500 ($3,300) loan. Fearful, Ms Janet rushed to the bank and withdrew $4,500 to send to Nigeria.

Luckily for her, a quick-thinking employee at the Clementi Central SingPost branch stopped her before she lost her life-savings to the scammers. Smelling a rat upon hearing Ms Janet's tale, Madam Rohana Sarmani, 52, got her to call her brother. It turned out he was safe and sound in Australia.

"When I saw the letter, I thought: 'Something is not right'," Mdm Rohana said, referring to the location the money was to be sent.

The company had recently sent out an alert about such scams, and she herself had encountered three similar cases this year.

On hindsight, Ms Janet admitted that she was too reckless.

"I just wanted to help him quickly because time was running out," she said. "I didn't realise that the letter didn't sound like it was written by my brother." TEO XUAN WEI

From TODAY, News – Wednesday, 29-April-2009

People lie more by email: Study

This is a bummer, at the least! Most of our business communications are already done through e-meow...
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From TODAY, World
Friday October 3, 2008

CYBER DECEPTION

ANAHEIM (California) — People are more likely to lie in an email than in other forms of communication, new research has shown.

Psychological tests conducted by business professors at Rutgers, Lehigh and DePaul universities in the United States found people are significantly more likely to lie in emails than in handwritten documents.

In the tests, 48 students were given US$89 ($99.50) and told to split it with a stranger who had little idea how much money was up for grabs.

A total of 92 per cent of the students lied when dividing the money over email, while 64 per cent lied when asked to write by hand. Emailers ended up handing over an average of US$29 — keeping $60 for themselves — while pen-and-paper negotiators gave up $34 and pocketed $55.

The paper, Being Honest Online, published at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management in California, suggests people feel they have more capacity to mislead when using high-tech communication than with more traditional methods.

“People seem to feel more justified in acting in self-serving ways when typing as opposed to writing,” said co-author Terri Kurtzberg, an associate professor at Rutgers Business School.

Co-author Liuba Belkin, an assistant professor at Lehigh University warned that businesses should be particularly careful when dealing with e-mail.

“You’re not afforded the luxury of seeing non-verbal and behavioural cues over email, and in an organizational context that leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation and — as we saw in our study — intentional deception,” he said.

THE GUARDIA N