A customer walked into UOB‘s Clementi branch and asked for a blank cashier’s order. No beneficiary name. When Deputy Branch Manager Luo Lan asked what the payment was for, the best he could manage was that it was for a “friend”.
He said it calmly, like a man with nothing to hide. He had already sent S$75,000 to someone impersonating a police officer. The scam was convincing enough to include a video call, a police uniform, and a backdrop dressed to look like a police station.
Luo kept asking questions until the story fell apart. The second S$75,000 never left the account.
That case is officially award-winning. On the evening of 4 September 2026, the National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) recognised 10 organisations at the second edition of the NCPC Crime Prevention Awards, held in conjunction with its annual appreciation dinner. The Guest-of-Honour was Mr K Shanmugam, Senior Minister, Coordinating Minister for National Security and Minister for Home Affairs.
Awards season normally means red carpets and reveals worth staying up for. This one handed trophies to branch managers and bus interchange supervisors, which makes the winner list a useful thing to read as a map of where scams in Singapore are being intercepted.
The Winner List, Mapped
Five organisations received the ‘Champion’ award for outstanding excellence and leadership in crime prevention: UOB, Go-Ahead Singapore, OCBC, Singapore Pools, and Marina Bay Sands. The ‘Partner’ recipients named in the release are SBS Transit and Shin Min Daily News, the Chinese-language evening paper.
Look at where those organisations actually meet the public. A bank counter, a bus interchange, a lottery outlet, a casino floor, a newsroom inbox. The front line against scams runs straight through the places you already move through in a week.
“Keeping Singapore safe is a shared responsibility, and the organisations recognised this year demonstrate what that looks like in practice,” NCPC Chairman Mr Gerald Singham said. He added that the Council was “heartened to see organisations from a diversity of sectors, such as healthcare, transport, and media, stepping up this year”.
NCPC was established in 1981 and marks its 45th anniversary this year. The previous edition of the awards, held in October 2025, leaned towards technology platforms and retail chains. This one runs through bank branches, a bus depot and a newsroom.
What Winning Looked Like
At UOB’s Toa Payoh branch, an elderly customer came in to break a fixed deposit early and take the money in cash. Deputy Branch Manager Ms Tricia Tan noticed the reason kept changing, from home renovations to finding a contractor. The customer would not provide supporting documents, and she refused to call her daughter.
Tan advised against the cash withdrawal and arranged a cashier’s order for deposit into another bank instead. That bought UOB time to alert the receiving bank and halt the transfer pending investigation. The customer came back later with a police report. S$31,000 of her savings stayed hers.
OCBC’s case is bleaker. In September 2025, a 74-year-old customer was told by people posing as bank staff and police officers that he was implicated in a money laundering investigation. He shared his phone screen, exposing his account balances. On their instructions he withdrew cash three separate times and handed over S$85,000 in a park to men he believed were helping with the case.
The scammers then told him to liquidate a S$350,000 unit trust investment and deposit the proceeds into a newly opened OCBC account. When he visited the Bishan branch on 8 October 2025, Customer Service Officer Ong Hui Fang and Personal Wealth Manager Ang Kok Jiun spotted inconsistencies in his account and multiple red flags. They spent hours with him, explaining the tactics being used, while escalating to OCBC’s Group Anti-Fraud team and the Police. The S$350,000 was safeguarded.
That save sits on top of quieter work. Through 2025, OCBC broadcast NCPC-produced scam awareness videos across all its branches for roughly six months, and pushed the ScamShield app and the 1799 Anti-Scam Helpline through its digital banking platforms and customer advisories. As scammers increasingly talk victims into withdrawing money physically, the bank’s branch employees stepped up interventions and prevented more scams at branches in 2025 than in 2024.
The Depot and the Interchange
Go-Ahead Singapore won its Champion award for the unglamorous half of crime prevention. At its East Coast Bus Depot, the operator runs an Integrated Visitor Management System with facial recognition to control access and keep unauthorised people out of critical transport infrastructure.
Its Crime Awareness and Security Vigilance Programme covers the rest: crime awareness workshops with the Singapore Police Force, monthly crime prevention advisories, outreach booths and roadshows, a “Be Aware, Stay Secure” security video, and Threat-Oriented Person Screening Integrated System (TOPSIS) briefings. More than 1,500 employees, contractors and tenants have been through those initiatives, with public-facing efforts at bus interchanges pushing commuters to report anything that looks wrong.
SBS Transit was the first public transport operator in Singapore to implement the TOPSIS programme, which trains staff to read behaviour rather than wait for an incident. On 25 February 2026 at Ang Mo Kio Bus Interchange, Interchange Supervisor Mr Chua Jin Kee noticed a commuter behaving oddly in the concourse during a routine patrol.
He kept watching. The individual moved to a nearby retail outlet and committed a shop theft offence, and Chua alerted the Police in time for them to intervene and investigate. The Singapore Police Force gave him a Letter of Appreciation, saying his actions reflected the “strong partnership between the Police and the community, which is one of the key reasons why Singapore continues to be one of the safest places in the world”.
The Numbers Behind the Trophies
The Singapore Police Force’s Annual Scams and Cybercrime Brief for 2025 carries the context a dinner cannot. Scam cases fell 27.6%, from 51,501 in 2024 to 37,308 in 2025. Total losses fell 17.9%, from about S$1.124 billion to around S$913.1 million.
Even after that drop, S$913.1 million left people’s accounts in a single year, in a country of six million. Adults aged 30 to 49 made up about 36.1% of victims in 2025, and police figures for the first half of 2024 put victims under 50 at 74.2%. The picture of a scam victim as somebody’s confused grandfather does not survive the data.
The Police Anti-Scam Command has recovered more than S$140 million in scam losses in recent years. That figure covers the whole system, not any one bank or bus operator, and the awards do not tell you which recipient blocked how much.
Getting Your Money Back
Recovering money runs on a separate system, and a strict one. The Shared Responsibility Framework took effect on 16 December 2024, issued jointly by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), and it covers digitally-enabled phishing scams.
The framework works as a duty-based waterfall. Banks carry obligations, telcos carry obligations, and a payout depends on who breached theirs. If both did everything required of them, the victim absorbs the whole loss. A trophy on the branch wall and a refund in your account are two very different things.
A 2026 industry survey by fraud-prevention firm BioCatch found that only about 30% of financial institutions in Singapore reimburse more than half of scam losses. Which is the strongest argument going for the kind of interception these awards recognise: money stopped at the counter never has to be clawed back.
100 Volunteers Patrol the Internet
NCPC used the night to update on Cyber Citizens on Patrol, or Cyber COP, a volunteer programme piloted with the Singapore Police Force. Volunteers scan online spaces for scams and suspicious activity, and what they report helps the Police step in early. Close to 100 people have come onboard, completed training and started patrolling since 1 August 2026. NCPC will review how well it works with the SPF before growing the force.
If money is moving right now, the chain is short. Stop talking to them. Call your bank’s fraud hotline and ask for a freeze: UOB’s runs 24/7 on 6255 0160, and its Money Lock feature ring-fences funds so they cannot be transferred out digitally, unlocked only in person at a UOB ATM in Singapore.
Then call the 24/7 ScamShield Helpline on 1799, and file a police report. Every award-winning save above began the same way, with somebody breaking the script the scammer had written.
🗓️ Date: Friday, 4 September 2026
⏰ Time: Evening, held in conjunction with NCPC’s annual appreciation dinner
📍 Location: Marina Bay Sands, Singapore
🏆 Champion Award: UOB, Go-Ahead Singapore, OCBC, Singapore Pools, and Marina Bay Sands
🤝 Partner Award (named in the release): SBS Transit and Shin Min Daily News
🎩 Guest-of-Honour: Mr K Shanmugam, Senior Minister, Coordinating Minister for National Security and Minister for Home Affairs
🎂 Milestone: NCPC’s 45th anniversary, established 1981
📞 If a scam is in progress: ScamShield Helpline 1799, Police Hotline 1800-255-0000, or 999 in an emergency
The awards run alongside NCPC’s appreciation dinner each year, so a third edition should land around this time in 2027, and the Cyber COP review decides whether that volunteer force grows before then. Follow the National Crime Prevention Council’s own channels for the next winner list and its scam advisories, if only to see which counter, app or bus interchange turns out to be the next place a scam gets caught. Then do one thing before you close this tab: save 1799 in your phone, and put your bank’s fraud hotline right under it.
Visuals courtesy of the National Crime Prevention Council.
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