As reported in The Straits Times, the Singapore Police Force (SPF) reported nearly 20,000 scam cases in the first half of 2025, with victims losing SGD 456 million. While the numbers appear flat compared to last year, Singapore remains among the world’s highest loss-per-capita countries with hundreds of dollars lost per citizen annually. Beyond financial losses, scams impose hidden costs on society. Significant resources are spent on police investigations and regulatory enforcement. Victims face emotional trauma and productivity loss and over time, scams erode public trust in banks and digital services.
The Anatomy of Today’s Scams
The latest statistics reveal that 79% of cases did not involve account takeovers. Instead, victims were persuaded to transfer money directly to criminals’ accounts. This shift has fuelled the rise of investment scams and government impersonation scams, both of which rely on mule account infrastructure to receive and launder funds.
Authorities in Singapore such as the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and SPF, have stepped up efforts to clamp down on mule accounts, but these measures are reactive, taken only once the crime has occurred and funds are lost.
The Missing Piece: Pre-Payment Trust
What is urgently needed is pre-transaction or pre-payment verification. Before a victim authorises a payment, they need confidence that the payee is who they claim to be. This is where Know Your Payee (KYP) comes in. By using a Payee Verification API to verify the payee account details in real time, financial institutions can block fraudulent transfers before money leaves a victim’s account.
Markets like the UK and Australia have introduced country-wide Confirmation of Payee (CoP) scheme and are already seeing results from these name check API solutions, while Europe’s Verification of Payee (VoP) will launch in October 2025. These initiatives all share the same principle: introduce real-time payee verification to build up-front trust in the payment process.
We first highlighted this issue in our October 2024 blog on Singapore’s scam scourge, making the case for Global Payee Verification as a critical line of defence. Now, we are starting to see the financial and payments industry in Singapore take steps to introduce these solutions, moving closer to embedding pre-payment trust into everyday transactions.
Singapore’s Opportunity
At iPiD, we are working with global partners to embed Know Your Payee (KYP) into the payment journey. For example, our collaboration with Nium integrates iPiD’s technology to strengthen payee verification across borders, helping payment providers meet Verification of Payee (VoP) requirements while reducing fraud risk. These collaborations demonstrate that fraud prevention and compliance can go hand-in-hand with seamless customer experience.
For Singapore, the challenge is not a lack of awareness but a mind-shift: moving from “after the crime” remediation to “before the crime” prevention. By investing in Global Payee Verification or KYP solutions, Singapore’s financial industry can take the lead in protecting citizens, restoring confidence, and reducing the societal cost of scams.
Don’t wait for scams to happen. Build pre-payment trust into every payment with iPiD’s Global Payee Verification solution.
