New Whatsapp Scam : Paid Survey Messages

 We received not one but four messages on Paid Survey yesterday.

While the first one looked like a genuine request, doubts were raised when multiple messages of similar content were received as the day went by.

A quick check and this scam was highlighted last month by Straits Times. The scammers were impersonating CASE officers. In our case, it was representative of Singsale.  While the companies may have changed, the modus operandi remains the same. The recipients will be invited to participate in a simple survey of 3 questions.

The questions are as follows

1) Do you use Online Shopping Applications? For example, Qoo10, Carousell, Lazada, Zalora

2) How Satisfied are you with these apps

3) How old are you.

The questions are very easy to answer and the reward for answering is a commission of $15 paid via paynow.

However, there are red flags in the messages.

1) It's too good to be true; it probably is

Answering a 30 secs survey and earn $15 sounds like easy money. For most surveys, to earn that kind of money, would require one to spend 2-3 hours answering a ton of questions and not just 3.

2) The numbers are foreign 

While the senders claim that they are representing local companies, the numbers are foreign. We received messages with country code +234 (Nigeria), +60 ( Malaysia)

3) Multiple messages, different companies.

The scammers send out similar messages but represent different companies. They are Singsale and Research Pacific Group Marketing.

Similar Scam

While the Straits Time article did not point out the consequences of replying to the messages, we uncovered at least one victim of a similar scam.

The method of scam is similar. The recipient was promised a commission to answer a simple survey. He did and was subsequently invited to earn more commissions to like youtube videos. As the recipient was paid for his commissions, he believed it was legitimate. 

The scammers took advantage of his trust and asked him to do other things, such as invest in cryptocurrency and purchase of products. To do so, he has to commit his own funds. He did it and did not get his money back. At the end of the day, the loss was 14K.

Report and Block

The best way to deal with these messages is to report and block the account. Do not respond to unsolicited messages if you cannot verify the source. You do not want to end up poorer as a result.

Some tried to scam the scammer by answering the initial questions, get the payment and subsequently do not answer. While this may sound like a good idea, there is a chance that the scammer are using your account to transfer funds from others victims. If this is so, you may be implicated should the scammers be caught.

Here is an exposé on Tiktok

@gilbertzhuo part 1 #scam #singapore ♬ original sound - Gilbert Zhuo

@gilbertzhuo #scam #singapore #crime ♬ original sound - Gilbert Zhuo