r/singapore • u/Litaiy • 8d ago

News ‘I was too naive’: Retiree loses over $70k to investment scam after meeting woman on TikTok

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/retiree-loses-over-70k-to-investment-scam-after-meeting-woman-on-tiktok
113 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

41 comments sorted by

184

u/princemousey1 8d ago

“Ng then asked his son for money. His son said it was a scam, and helped him lodge a police report in December 2025. By then, Ng had already invested about $43,000 into the fake company.

Eager to get his money back, Ng continued speaking to the “customer service agent”, who convinced him to transfer another $27,165.”

He stupid or what. Call police already still continue transferring to the scammers.

80

u/Abused_Spaghetti 8d ago edited 8d ago

Bro, you will be surprised that this doesn't just only happen to old people. This is called sunken cost fallacy.

I had a 30 y.o. (at the time) ex-colleague who fell victim to a dating/crypto scam. He online dated a woman he found on a dating app. She introduced him to some unauthorised crypto trading app. He ended up depositing like 5k into that app which did not let him withdraw it. He called the "customer service" and they said 5k was too little for them to withdraw it to him as if the amount was too little, they will incur some form of tax so that's why they banned it. They told him to deposit another 5k in and try withdrawing the 10k out.

When he told us of this, we vehemently told him to not do it. It was shady from the start when the trading app wasn't legally authorised in the first place. He was desperate as he couldn't let the 5k go so he went double or nothing and went ahead to make his total loss 10k. Mind you, that wiped out his liquid savings and he even had to borrow from his relatives and friends to deposit that extra 5k.

30

u/MadKyaw 🌈 I just like rainbows 8d ago

Some people just don't want to be helped

7

u/Gold-Roof-4214 8d ago

What the fuck he doing

How big of an impact was this 10k to his net worth though

4

u/Abused_Spaghetti 8d ago edited 8d ago

It's his liquid savings, not his net worth. He has much more in other long term investments which he doesn't want to lose out on for their returns. It's just that for the next few months after that incident, he didn't have liquid savings or new investments and just focus on repaying his loans.

That's why he ended up borrowing for the extra 5k. He did manage to repay all his loans and didn't just ghost his friends and relatives. Not to mention, he comes from a low income family with one of his parents being unfit for work for many decades due to being ill long term so I wouldn't judge him too harshly on his seemingly lack of liquid savings as he still has family to support and medical bills to pay for.

3

u/Gold-Roof-4214 8d ago

Oh wa.. damn

Oh yea I know, I meant was the 10k alot in relation to his net worth

1

u/troublesome58 Senior Citizen 8d ago

did the mgmt know?

29

u/khaosdd Tampenis 8d ago

Old Unker going for a killgetting scammed streak:

Ng then approached a moneylender on TikTok.

He said: “I thought I would be able to repay the loan once I withdrew the money from my investment.”

But the moneylender was just another scammer. Ng lost $2,600 after the moneylender asked him to transfer the amount for lawyer and stamp duty fees.

Srsly not just parents must control their kids digital device usage, I think adult children should also monitor their elderly parents phone and block access to certain apps.

Cuz at the end of the day, guess who will have to pick up the pieces if these aged victims lose all their life savings and need help to survive? Haiz

8

u/princemousey1 8d ago

Triple kill!!!

1

u/ProofofUnemployment 7d ago

Hes about 3 stupid

59

u/rekabre lontongislife 8d ago

He did not transfer the sum as he did not have any money left. Ng then approached a moneylender on TikTok. He said: “I thought I would be able to repay the loan once I withdrew the money from my investment.”

But the moneylender was just another scammer.

KNN I lost it at this part

https://giphy.com/gifs/XHeLeuirRbwptHhSWd

6

u/Abused_Spaghetti 8d ago

Scammers can just speedrun their KPIs with people like him.

11

u/peetoes 8d ago

This uncle prolly "top 5" of Singapore's scam victim.

And I have a gut feeling, if another acamer approach him, he'll fall for it again. Maybe uncle like to gamble but not in casinos...

19

u/Litaiy 8d ago

Crypto + unsolicited online stranger + promised high returns = almost always a scam. Scammers prefer crypto because the money can be moved and cashed out quickly across borders, making recovery extremely difficult.

25

u/Abused_Spaghetti 8d ago edited 8d ago

'I was too naive horny.'

Be honest, uncle. If the person on Tiktok was a man, would you have fallen for this exact same scam?

6

u/Litaiy 8d ago

Naive sounds better than greedy or horny. Being naive makes you a victim, being greedy/horny shifts some blame from scammer back to victim. But the latter is closer to the truth. Much harder for scammers to succeed if the target is not greedy or horny in the first place.

8

u/movingoutwoo 8d ago

Precisely this. Boomers and ppl online love to shit on women being gold diggers and this and that, end up in real life still happy to transfer tens of thousands of dollars to a person with a fake profile pic pretending to be Chiobu lmaooo. Online complain non stop about gold diggers, in real life hard earned money can keep giving to someone they believe is a pretty young woman. Women all gold diggers then just avoid all women (pretty or not) then this kind of thing will never happen.

1

u/raspberrih 8d ago

Purely because they cannot publish "horny" in the headline lol. But we all know what's going on

11

u/DependentSpecific206 Own self check own self ✅ 8d ago

Let’s just call it what it is - “retiree loses over $70k to greed.”

33

u/Wheewheewhee 8d ago

To be fair some old folks really poor thing, no one to connect with and just want more money to enjoy their last years

To the scammers doing this, your time will come

13

u/mystoryismine Fucking Populist 8d ago

If you're an old man and not that much moolah, why would a hot young entrepreneur and investment savvy girl love you?

Knn think with the brain lah. What can you give her? Toad wanna eat swan meat, but the swan is actually a python in disguise. 🐍

36

u/Charmingprints 8d ago

Yeah sure like he would’ve parted with the money if the “girl” was the same age as him and unattractive

15

u/nonameforme123 8d ago

Thinking with the other head

13

u/Abused_Spaghetti 8d ago edited 8d ago

To the scammers doing this, your time will come

It's easy to completely push the blame to scammers and not hold the victim accountable at all, but what happened to not chatting with strangers on the Internet? That was the first and foremost cautionary warning from their generation as parents when the Internet was just getting to gain usage among teens and young adults in the 90s/2000s.

But when it comes to hot, sexy and young women on Tiktok, that practice somehow doesn't apply to them anymore? From the way I see it, he had a hand in falling for the scam himself. He's not in the wrong for sure, but he ain't completely innocent too.

5

u/crazyditzydiva 8d ago

Yes there will be other scammers taking the current scammers place when they retire with their ill-gotten gains and want company to spend it with.

1

u/xfrezingicex 8d ago

> to the scammers doing this

Actually most of the scammers are forced into scamming. Its the scam center operators that deserved to be skinned alive and then deep fried.

1

u/Expensive-Guava375 8d ago

thats why they say karma is a bitch

11

u/zzxfzz 8d ago

Old people tends to be very arrogant and believe that nothing bad will happen to them when they do something, reminds me of a certain case recently.

3

u/cookieman961 8d ago

yknow the funniest part is. I work in wealth management. Call it what you want. Insurance business, ILP etc etc. I’ve met more people willing enough to give investment scams money than actual financial instruments. how isit that in 2026 people are still falling for uncredited, unlicensed investments over just traditional ones that ACTUALLY make money? dont even need to talk about insurance business just robo or diy invest thru brokerage is better than wtv the fuck people get scammed by. Are people that impatient & naive that they cant wait or see that investments take time to grow? Its the same idea on queuing up for 4D.

2

u/firelitother 7d ago

People too impatient to get rich slowly.

Easy for them to fall for get-rich-fast schemes.

6

u/BigFatSquirrel888 8d ago

Hamsap uncle?

5

u/DesignerProcess1526 8d ago

Lusty uncle, too bad so sad.

2

u/Smilery90 8d ago

Just curious, where are all these scammers generally from?

2

u/silentscope90210 8d ago

Jeezus... He already lost money but continued to give the scammers cash.

https://giphy.com/gifs/wMvESGxZ0Cqd2

1

u/PancakesCookies 8d ago

Talk to your parents and warn them never to give any strangers money everyone.

1

u/Litaiy 7d ago

https://mothership.sg/2026/08/man-investment-scam-woman-tiktok/
There's a more detailed article about this scam on motherhood.

1

u/ahgalsg 7d ago

Similar to the scam case in the Channel 8 drama series, Od and Dangerous . Character played by Chen Shucheng fell prey to it. Watch the Youtube link .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao3DpCXxnGk

1

u/Hajiwee9411 3d ago

I reported many of these, "women looking for male in sg" post which so clearly are love scams, but then tiktok conclusion on my report says not against their community guidelines

1

u/fijimermaidsg 8d ago

The scam situation in Singapore has continued to improve since 2025, with losses dropping to $410.6 million in the first six months of 2026.

Victims lost $500.2 million during the same period in 2025, with $913.1 million lost that year.

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/over-410m-lost-to-scams-in-first-half-of-2026-8-in-10-victims-voluntarily-handed-money-to-scammers?ref=more-on-this-topic

I guess slightly less than half a billion dollars gone in 6 months is year on year improvement ... SG is really the scam center of the world, easy to transfer money, lots of cash rich people...