Deepfake scam losses hit S$242.9M, Singapore adds prefix

Someone in Singapore lost, on average, more than seventy thousand dollars to a scam last year. The caller looked official. The face on the video call looked like a senior government minister. None of it was real.

If you've ever picked up a call from a number you

If you've ever picked up a call from a number you recognized and trusted it, this story is about you. Singapore's police say government impersonation scams jumped to more than three thousand cases last year. The losses came to nearly two hundred and forty-three million Singapore dollars. That's more than double the year before. And now the country is trying something new, a special prefix on the front of every genuine government call, so you know it's really them. But can a phone number still prove who's calling?

Let's start with why the losses got so big. Police say much of this was driven by A.I. deepfakes, fake videos that put a real official's face on a scammer's script. Picture answering a video call and seeing someone who looks exactly like a government minister telling you your bank account is under investigation. That's what victims saw. The average person who fell for it lost over seventy thousand dollars. For most families, that's savings built over years.

Here's how fast this is moving. According to security researchers, deepfake fraud attempts have climbed more than two thousand percent over three years. That's not a typo. Roughly one in every fifteen fraud cases now involves a deepfake. And cloning a voice is almost trivial now. Researchers say just three seconds of your recorded audio is enough to build a copy of your voice that fools most people. Three seconds. That's a voicemail greeting. That's a clip from a video you posted.

So Singapore's answer is that prefix. The police will test it later this year before other agencies adopt it. The idea is simple, a common marker at the start of the number that says this call route is genuine. But officials themselves call it just one layer. Their words, scam prevention needs a "multi-layered approach" across government, banks, tech platforms, and you. For the businesses listening, there's a hard number here. Companies that added call-authentication tools saw successful spoofing attacks drop by nearly a third. Good, until you learn that international scam calls slip past local protections more than half the time. Which brings us to the catch.