I got matched with this account on tinder going by the name Emma, ethnicity Chinese, who wanted to instantly move the conversation to WhatsApp. 

The WhatsApp account was setup under a name “jamie chen” (different from tinder) with no profile picture. The phone number used on WhatsApp was a VoIP from a VoIP app (+65 3*** ***5) which can be created in less than 5 minutes using a VPN.

The conversation went on for a few days when they finally asked me to set up an account on okex (crypto exchange) and then shared the link to add 100-500 usdt on it promising that they will make me profit from it.

The link was obviously phishy and i never opened it but it would most likely have phished my crypto exchange passwords or simply went away with the 100-500 usdt i add to the platform.

I did not figure this entire thing out from the very beginning and only started getting suspicious as days went on.

Beware guys, no hot girl wants to help you make money on crypto hours after you match on Tinder.

How does investment scam:

You receive a message from someone claiming to be stockbrokers or bank or financial company employees on social networking sites like Facebook, WeChat or Line. They ask you to share personal details like NRIC and passport numbers for an investment form. You are then asked to transfer money to banks in Hong Kong and China, pay hefty administrative and security fees, and taxes in order to receive the profits and returns.

You may also receive phone calls from people claiming to be from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority or Hong Kong Overseas Control Centre, asking for a deposit before profits can be released.

In other cases, you may be asked by an online friend to invest in cryptocurrencies, which are highly volatile and unregulated in Singapore.

I live in an apartment whereby a common space (not sure how best to describe it) exist across two adjacent blocks.

The space kinda resemble a wind channel because the two blocks fully surrounds it and only way for air to leave this channel, is through the top end of this channel aka. the top floors of the blocks.

Someone/some neighbours who resides in the two blocks I am in, are chronic smokers, and he/she/they smoke at their service yard, which has windows opening to the air channel mentioned above.

What happens whenever they smoke, is that the smoke that gets puffed out, is trapped in the air channel. When my yard windows are opened, the “stagnant” smoke gets into my house, into my family laundry (left to dry at the yard) and the kitchen (beside the service yard).

My family are non-smokers thus keep our yard windows closed pretty much at all times.

Just curious if anyone has been in similar situations and managed to get a successful resolution eventually (or silently suck thumb)?

Like to end with that I respect that smokers have their rights to puff, especially in their own homes. It just irks me when their decision to smoke at home causes inconvenience to my family.

Netizens’ comments

• I heard people rarely settle disputes with smokers. As a smoker myself, I’d appreciate it if my neighbours would go up to me and tell me that I should smoke elsewhere as it affects their house. I’d instantly just smoke at the ground floor instead further from homes.
  • Problem is I don’t even know which household.. same thing happens after I post message in group chat

I have been renting a HDB apartment from a landlord, let’s call her Mdm A, since October 2021. The stipulated monthly rent for the apartment stated in the tenancy agreement is $1800. Mdm A confided in me that she was having financial difficulties and proposed an arrangement where if an advance payment of rent was made, I would be given a discount of $200 per month. I agreed to the arrangement given and in October 2021, I made an advance payment of $4800 for the months of Nov 2021 to March 2022.

She begged and pestered me repeatedly for more advance payments, which I stupidly agreed out of goodwill.

In December 2021, I made an advance payment of $8530 for the months of April to October 2022, receiving a discount of $300 per month.

On the first week of February, Mdm A asked me again whether I was able to make an advance payment for months of November 2022 to April 2023. I did not agree to make advance payments this time as I did not have the financial capability. Following this, Mdm A informed me that I would have to move out by June 2022 as she would be able to find tenants that are willing to make advance payments. While Mdm A has offered to pay back the remaining months of rent, I highly doubt she would.

As of today, I’ve made a check on HDB website regarding the authorised tenants list for the current rented apartment, I realised that Mdm A had already removed all the authorised tenants which included myself and my partner. This sort of implies that we are living at the rented apartment ‘illegally’.

I’ve contacted HDB for help and was told that they will not involve in this dispute. A police report had also been made.

How will I be able to claw back the advanced rent payments from Mdm A? Would appreciate if anyone could offer their advice as I don’t know what I should do now.

P.S. I do keep a copy of all the e-receipt, updated tenancy agreement (docu sign off) with the clause added regarding advance rental, whatsapp convo with print screen, and also stamp duty, to show she is a legit landlord as without the owner of the house cannot make a stamp duty. There were also consequential damages involved (bills, water, electricity, internet).

I (38M) have been married to my wife ‘Vanessa’ (38F) for 12 years, and together for 15.

Hi all. Times have been super hard lately, and I hope everyone has been staying safe. (:

To go straight to the point- I’ve been faced with a frustrating problem recently. Staying objective – I will try to keep it as concise as possible lah. But it’s a long story ahead. I can’t seem to get any info online that’s specifically local so this is why I am here.

TLDR/ extended family member has applied for mobile and broadband plans under my name without my authorisation and now I have been served a lawyers notice for unpaid amount of ~5k.

Maybe this is not the right outlet to ask all these but I genuinely don’t know where to go to. If there is- please do feel free to let me know. (:

————-

About myself, I am above 21, work full-time at a decent job. I don’t have a credit card, no loans, any bills I have is under my family’s name and I pay cash to them monthly.

But recently I received a lawyers letter informing me that I owe a significant amount of ~5k to X mobile service provider – which came as a shock as I have never: 1. Applied for anything under them, 2. Did not receive any overdue payment notice previously leading up to the letter.

I called the service provider and found out someone has applied for a few mobile/broadband plans under my name in late 2020. Managed to dig up part of the address the bills were mailed to, and I know (possibly) who this person is.

For context: I have helped this person apply for a student plan under my name in 2016* after my family was incessant on me to help. This person is very close to us (extended family). I went physically with the person to sign the contract so I knew how much was due monthly.

I also passed this person my IC (in 2016, same time as above) to make a photocopy for a re-contract (Yes stupid I know. But my family had asked me to help. Lesson learnt).

All was paid on time and no issue came up until the most recent lawyers letter. Additionally, the initial student plan that I have paid for would’ve ended already.

As the debt is under my name, I am intending to file a report because the plans were made fraudulently – this seems to be the only logical way to go about it to also protect myself.

However my family is against it as they are traditional and stick to “blood is thicker than water” Doing so will definitely harm my family’s relationship with me. But I know I need to put myself first.

Without getting too personal – this person (along with his/her’s family) has put my family in similar situations before (I’ve only found out about this).

I refuse to allow them to continue putting us in financial disarray for any longer. We have been in big debt because of them and I want to them to be accountable.

It’ll be great if anyone else has been in my situation- and know if the police would even consider this because of the first time I have helped. As far as I know I only gave authorisation in 2016* (initially I wrote 2017 but i got my years mixed while typing. Oops.)

If there are any other ways of going about this that I might know of – please do reach out, or if there is anything else I need to check. Filing a civil lawsuit is not within my means for sure. Also I’m worried for my family and I’s safety because people can be unpredictable lah.

Are there also any repercussions on me in the future due to the debt? I try my best to be financially responsible and this is genuinely causing unneeded anxiety and stress. Financial knowledge was never a topic in my family. So I would appreciate any tips I could get.

A netizen recently lost money to a scammer after he got greedy and tried to earn some money from Forex trading but he did not go through the proper channels.

He did the trades via a scammer and got implicated in a case and he faces investigations as well.

Here is the story:

I knew Justin from Facebook and he portrayed a luxurious life with strong forex trading. Taking a leap of faith, I opened a trading account and made money at first.

He then asked me to pool the money with him as he is having too many customers and hard to do the trading 1 by 1.

He also has some investors to transfer money to me and said that it can be held as collateral and profit disbursement as his personal bank account is constantly maxed out with transactions daily.

Things started to get ugly when he couldn’t give us back the weekly profit as promised. I then received a text saying that I may have transferred money to an account related to an investment scam which I made a police report promptly.

His investors that transferred money to me also made a police report against him but as the money was transferred to me before RELEASING it to him, I’m now implicated and my bank account is frozen. I called up the investigation officer and was told that I’ll be called down for an investigation.

I now live in anxiety as I have 2 young daughters and a wife to feed and this happened just because I trusted his forex investments.

The pandemic, job loss, quarantine, teens schooling at home, travel plans canceled, and the divisive culture put a huge strain on an already rocky marriage.

The “perfect couple” as everyone saw was struggling on a daily basis.

Renovation the part and parcel of life especially for those that are getting an HDB or a new condominium.

A man recently shared a story about how interior designers became uncontactable after he made a deposit and his home was left half done.

Here is the story:

The issues homeowners face from our local renovation industry are not being discussed enough online. There are a ton of under-the-table deals at the expense of homeowners, zero regulation and a lot of scams homeowners have to dodge.

It should not be this hard for the average Singaporean to renovate a home. Things need to change in this industry.

IDs don’t require going through any courses or getting certifications before they become IDs. This is different from for e.g the real estate industry where you have to register with CEA and wear your tag whenever you are on-site. Or the financial industry where a business may need MAS regulation. For IDs, anyone can call themselves one, start a company and the moment there is a disupute, close down / run away with the deposit / start a new company. There are many such reported cases in the papers.

But what I want to talk about here is the under-the-table relationship between IDs and suppliers that many Singaporeans are not aware of. Because homeowners like us will never know the real prices of materials, we will always be vulnerable to shady IDs and contractors. Because of the lack of regulation, there is nothing to stop IDs from overcharging as they please. Or even suppliers overcharging customers (us homeowners) when we try to manage the process directly.

We may even be thinking we’re getting a good deal when we’re not. Think of the Tuk Tuk’s in BKK that camp outside a tourist spot in a cartel-like manner to jack up prices together or the taxi mafia that prevents Grab drivers from coming in to pick up tourists. Sure, you can get market rates if you walk 1km+ out with your luggage to the open road and try your luck there. But it should NOT be that way.

I am sharing my experience with a recent interior designer (ID) because what happened to us is very common in the industry and we should talk about it and push for change.

Why it is difficult for the average homeowner:

• The Interior Designer I worked with has just two people (project managers) in their company. They engage various contractors for all the work done. So think of them as the main-con.
  
• Usually how it works is this: You either pay a project management fee and that is the price you pay for the convenience and they are then supposed to work in your interest to get the best rates for you, since they are already getting paid for that service. OR you don’t pay a project management fee and they take a cut from the sub-contractors to earn. I understand that they have to make money too.
  
• In my case, my ID requested a project management fee of $15,000+ for the management and design of our home. (Context: The whole renovation project cost was over $100k and I stay in a private property.) Because of the fee, she said she would will not charge any mark-ups and will provide me with all the invoices. At first, she claimed it was not a practise to provide any invoices to clients. But I insisted for them. This rang some alarm bells but because they were a third-party recommendation, we still went ahead.
  
• Throughout our time working with her, we realised several contract amounts not tallying up, many promises to fix things always were “forgotten” and I’m not gonna go into detail but at this point, there were over 10 instances of dishonesty (that we just gave her the benefit of the doubt for) and it was getting hard to trust the things she was saying.
  
• We started to get suspicious when we requested for add-ons which required new quotes. I would request for 3 quotes but she always came back with just one. At first, I thought she was just lazy for always using the same expensive supplier because she didn’t want to find more quotes for us and always said there was no one else.

How shady interior design firms operate in Singapore

• Our suspicions lead us to ask around and get the quotations ourselves and boy did we get a huge shock. For 3 separate additions (small issues like blinds/curtains/etc), our quotes were half the price as the quotes she was giving us.
  
• Turns out, one of the contractors we ended up getting the quote from was a current supplier of hers, who offered us a much lower rate. And he explained to us how her company operates, and how the ID + supplier industry works in general.
  
• He said they will approach the supplier and ask for the cost price that they will charge. Then, they will add their own cut to it between 20%-50% markup and ask the supplier to issue clients the invoice with the inflated amount. The more she thinks she can get away with it, the higher % she will add. Once she finds a supplier who is willing to do this with her, she will keep using that same supplier. Hence that guy giving better rates was not chosen.
• So any homeowner who receives the invoice will feel that it is legit, but actually, it is heavily inflated due to the special agreement between her and the supplier. The invoice is a clever ruse to trick homeowners.
• We ended up exceeding our renovation budget by about $30k with the provisional charges for things like electricity doubling from $10k to $20k.
  
• What makes us so angry is how she said she was going to charge an overall fee for project management ($15k+) so everything would be transparent. e.g same logic as hiring a main contractor. But all this while, she was getting under the table deals too, inflating the invoices and effectively charging us twice – one from the comms and one for her lump sum fee.
  
• Because she inflated the amount, instead of us getting our dream home we saved up years for, we had to do away with some features we really wanted because it was over our budget due to the extra money was going to her as under the table profit.

Apparently, my story isn’t anything new. This is common in the ID industry as homeowners like us who are looking to renovate will never know the real pricing. And we probably just do this once or twice in our lives and then the ID moves on to their next victim. It does make business sense for the ID and supplier to continue work together to mark up invoices for the next project.

In other industries, there is regulation. When given a fee, an agent is supposed to act in the best interest of the principal, otherwise there is a conflict of interest and it must be declared. This is why laywers etc have to do a conflict of interest check before taking up a case. And if there is a conflict of interest found e.g the NP parks Brompton bikes case where bikes were bought at heavily inflated rates, things get called out and the culprits do jail time. But there isn’t anything like this in the ID industry and conflict of interest is rampant.

Has anyone here faced issues like this before? Is there any action we can take? Not sure what to do now, hope someone can help.

I got a message from this guy called tony wang. he mentioned Ig pushed my account to him hence he was interested to make friends.

We chat and he proceeded to ask me to chat via WhatsApp instead.

He started to follow me on Instagram and we chatted quite often, almost every day.

slowly, he said he wished to give me some money to spend and sent me a link to to create an account. Obviously, I refused but he created an account and deposited usd500 for into that account. the following night he convinced me to do some investment with him by transaction some money into the cycles and there are times when you get some returns, all in all, the “investment” from usd500 increased to usd585 and he told me to cash it out so that the next time when we meet i can return him the money if I do not want it.

subsequently, he did get me to put in like 5k but I rejected and told him I do not have money.

Kind of fought but he continued to chat along and after a month later, he decided to get me to put in 30k instead.

The account this platform used to allow you to transfer to is a personal account from a standard chartered bank, and the account holder is called salamah bte ma???? with a Paynow number of 8??? 8???.

I did not lose any money from this though as I kept insisting I do not have enough money. just sharing some details here so that others can be more vigilant on these type of scam when they do google search on certain phone numbers or account details.