Singapore’s anti-scam war: Catching mules, missing masterminds

The report card for Singapore called fraud and scams the country’s most prominent money laundering threat. Issued in May (Opens in new window) by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG) (Opens in new window), this mutual evaluation of Singapore assessed the country’s laws, regulations, institutions, supervision, enforcement, and operational outcomes to combat money laundering, along with counter-terrorist financing and counter-proliferation financing measures.

The very same day, (Opens in new window) 6 May 2026, the Singapore Police Force put out an alert on scams involving the impersonation of senior government officials and later released details of the most daring deepfake-enabled scam (Opens in new window) ever to be executed in Singapore.

Since 2019, Singapore has lost more than S$4 billion to scams (Opens in new window). In 2025 alone, S$913 million was scammed, a slight improvement from S$1.1 billion the year before (Opens in new window), but still far above pre-pandemic levels.

Singapore’s response to the rising scam scourge has been impressive. In 2020, the ScamShield (Opens in new window) app was released, and then the 1799 helpline (Opens in new window), both as channels for residents to report suspected cases of fraud. In 2022, the Anti-Scam Command Centre (Opens in new window), the lead agency fighting scam syndicates, was launched, followed two years later by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Collaborative Sharing of Money Laundering/Terrorism Financing Information & Cases (COSMIC (Opens in new window)) platform, which enables real-time information sharing between banks. Then came the Anti-Money Laundering Case Coordination and Collaboration Network (), enabling cross-agency cooperation.

Singapore has also been active regionally. The establishment of FRONTIER+ (Opens in new window) (Funds Recovery Operations & Networks Team, Inspiring Effective Resolution Plus) in 2024 came as a collaboration of anti-scam agencies across 11 jurisdictions, including Singapore and Australia, which has already busted 17 transnational scam syndicates (Opens in new window).

Singapore enacted the Criminal Law (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act 2025 (Opens in new window) at the end of 2025, bringing mandatory caning as a punishment for scammers.

Singapore’s whole-of-government coordination and public-private information sharing are substantial strengths. Yet the FATF evaluation (Opens in new window) also found that while over 11,000 money laundering investigations were opened in five years, more than 80% of them came from victim complaints about cyber-enabled fraud. The evaluation also found that only 682 natural persons were prosecuted from 7,594 referrals, a conversion rate the report placed below 10%. The sanctions have fallen mainly on runners, not the architects of the fraud operations.

This is the gap the FATF assessment flagged. Singapore achieved “Substantial Effectiveness” in most categories, including risk understanding, supervision, asset recovery, financial intelligence, and international cooperation. However, only “Moderate Effectiveness” was achieved in two critical areas: money laundering prosecutions and beneficial ownership accuracy.

The report noted that Singapore “has experienced challenges in converting investigations into prosecutions”. It remains to be seen whether new legislation that Singapore has passed to address this issue will make a dent.

Neighbouring Malaysia’s 2025 FATF assessment (Opens in new window) tells a similar story. Since 2015, Malaysia has enacted considerable reforms, strengthened legal frameworks and introduced robust supervision of financial institutions, but the same challenge remains: converting investigations into prosecutions and convictions.

Malaysia did perform better (Opens in new window) on the technical compliance dimensions of beneficial ownership. Its framework was rated “Largely Compliant”, whereas Singapore was rated “Partially Compliant” with both. The distinction matters. Singapore’s framework is better positioned to catch nominees than the beneficial owners directing them.

The deeper policy problem is that cyber-enabled fraud and money laundering are not separate phenomena. As FATF’s 2026 paper on cyber-enabled fraud (Opens in new window) explains, large-scale schemes increasingly incorporate laundering mechanisms from the outset, using nominee accounts, mule networks, fintech platforms, virtual assets and rapid cross-border transfers. The fraud is the method of victimisation; laundering is the infrastructure that converts stolen funds into usable criminal proceeds. An enforcement model focusing mainly on victim complaints will tend to identify the most visible and replaceable participants rather than the organisers, facilitators and professional enablers who sustain the enterprise.

Financial intelligence should be used more systematically to initiate complex investigations rather than principally to support complaint-led cases. Recovery occurs downstream; durable prevention requires dismantling the laundering infrastructure upstream. Beneficial ownership information should be verified, kept current and extended across higher-risk corporate structures – while formal international cooperation should be used more frequently because the principal threats, assets and decision makers are often located outside Singapore.

Singapore has built an innovative and coordinated response. The next phase should be judged less by the number of accounts frozen or mules prosecuted than by whether it raises the operational costs of syndicates, removes professional intermediaries and prevents illicit proceeds from entering the financial system. At the same time, upstream controls should be calibrated to avoid imposing unnecessary friction on legitimate activity. This principle was reflected in MAS’s 25 May 2026 direction (Opens in new window) that financial institutions assess clients’ source of wealth using materiality and relevance, alongside its effort to reduce the time required to open private banking accounts within one month.

A sustainable anti-fraud framework should raise the operational costs faced by criminal syndicates without creating disproportionate burdens that weaken Singapore’s competitiveness or divert legitimate capital elsewhere.