Keynote Address by Minister for Law and Second Minister for Home Affairs Edwin Tong SC at the 2026 ABA Global White Collar Crime Institute – Singapore Conference
13 July 2026 Posted in Speeches
Mr Lucien Dervan, Founding Chair of the American Bar Association (ABA) Global White Collar Crime Institute
Professor Tan Cheng Han, SC, President of the Law Society of Singapore
Mr Danny Ong, SC, Managing Director of Setia Law
To our distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,
Introduction
1. First, I would like to start by warmly welcoming all of you to Singapore – not just weather-wise because I know it is warm in Singapore, but also, I hope that our hospitality has been equally warm. I also hope that you will be able to enjoy a little bit of our cuisine, and take some time to have a look around the city.
2. We heard a lot about the law, but I thought I will start by speaking about where you are now. You are now at the Asian Civilisations Museum, and in the previous term of government, I was the Culture Minister.
3. I must say that in Singapore, you will find that our diversity is a strength, and this is not going to be better portrayed than what you might see in the exhibits at this museum.
4. This is one of my favourite museums, so I hope you have the time to take a look around and understand a little bit about Singapore – how it has shaped its path, forged its way into what it is today in the context of the broader Southeast Asia, Malay Archipelago region. Of course, looking at culture across time really tells us a story of who we are.
5. In many ways, the work that we do as global white-collar crime practitioners reflects that different cultural nuance and instinct that we all have. I believe that this is something that will keep us on an even keel as we look at working, hopefully increasingly in a more connected, cross-border fashion, amongst all of us practising in different jurisdictions.
6. This morning, what I thought I would do is to share my perspectives with you from the Singapore lens. I spent many years in practice, so I have been shaped by that practice. But I was last in practice some eight and a half years ago now, and I think the world was really quite a different place then – in terms of technology, the scale of white-collar crime, and the proliferation of the methods by which white-collar crime is being practiced. I did a couple of criminal matters, but the way in which we are dealing with the proceeds, for example, has changed at scale and at pace.
7. I thought I will share some of that with you this morning, as well as from our perspective, what have been some of the legal innovations – by way of operations, by way of legislation – that we have had to implement in the last few years, to deal with the proliferation of white-collar crime.
The evolving threat landscape
8. Let me start by saying that this year – 2026 – is a significant one for Singapore. This year we commemorate the bicentennial of our modern legal system, and our modern legal system is traced back 200 years ago to the Second Charter of Justice. At that time, we received everything from the UK, including the legal system. Of course, over time, we have contextualised it. We have, in many ways, also developed our own law in several areas, which we feel are more relevant for Singapore as we begin to grow as a nation. We also developed different priorities – as I said, culturally, and also in terms of our role in the economy.
9. As we reflect on 200 years of legal development, one lesson really stands out: that trust we have in the system is hard-earned. It is easily eroded and it is constantly tested every day. Today, it is buffeted with attacks on institutions, and attempts to undermine trust in institutions.
10. Singapore is a small city-state. We are tiny compared to most countries that all of you come from, with no natural resources.
11. After we became a sovereign nation in 1965 – 61 years ago – trust and the rule of law became the foundational pieces of our nation-building exercise. Everything that we have done since then is founded on and anchored by the rule of law. This, in my view, has enabled Singapore to become a thriving global economy, and hopefully continue to be a relatively low-crime society1.
12. Our laws and our institutions had to continually evolve and reinvent themselves, to seize opportunities and deal with evolving threats as we saw them, and stay relevant in the face of new challenges.
13. The very trends that enabled our economies to flourish – globalisation, connectivity, digitalisation and now, of course, AI – have also transformed the nature of white-collar crime. For us gathered here today, the question is the same: what must we do differently to respond to these trends, to respond to these evolutions which have moved from being institution-specific and jurisdiction-bound, to becoming technology-enabled, industrialised, fast-paced, and as you heard from the previous speakers, cross-border, borderless.
14. When I first started my career – it is now coming up to 30 odd years now – white-collar crime looked very different.
15. One of the most defining cases of my time as a really young lawyer back then, was of course the collapse of Barings Bank, brought about by the activities of one Nick Leeson, a derivatives trader. He abused his position at the bank to make unauthorised trades; then falsified accounts to conceal losses and show artificial profits. That spawned many other pieces of litigation and proceeds tracing around the world.
16. Others, perhaps the older amongst our audience today, might also remember Pan-Electric in the 80s, where fraudulent trading and criminal breach of trust led to the collapse of one of our major companies. The Stock Exchange of Singapore suspended trading for three days, which was unprecedented at that point. Many investors had their savings wiped out. It was overall a major shock to the financial system, which was barely recovering at that time from the global recession.
17. One of the first major cases involving computers came in the early 2000s, where one Mr Teo Cheng Kiat, who was a Singapore Airlines employee, manipulated SIA’s computer systems to embezzle money and forge reports. This took place between 1987 and 2002 - quite a number of years. In that period, he embezzled nearly $35 million. Today, you can probably embezzle that sum in about two minutes, and transfer the monies to a different country within that time as well.
Technology: The Force Multiplier
18. So in these and many other similar cases from that earlier period, the perpetrators were often lone actors, or rogue firms within a particular institution or industry. They were also recognisably from a very different era, as the examples I have shown manifest. Criminals would need access to the institution (physical access in many ways) or were part of the institution that they sought to exploit. And of course, funds moved more slowly.
19. One of the other cases that I used to deal with was the activities of one Kevin Wallace. He was a senior employee of Merrill Lynch, and again, his activities spawned numerous pieces of litigation around the world, with many consequences. I remember that we were very busy working on injunction after injunction to stop asset flow, to stop asset dissipation. In those days, it was effective – you get an order, even if it is not ex-parte, but inter partes, you will be able to, with the injunction order, put a stop to asset dissipation.
20. But today, the technology, powered by the internet, and of course, increasingly AI, has largely collapsed all of those constraints that I spoke about in the perpetration of white-collar crime.
21. Criminals no longer need to be physically present. They don’t need to be part of the organisation or in the organisation. In fact, they don’t even have to be in the same country or time zone, much less institutionally embedded, to inflict large-scale harm.
22. So, the internet has given scammers unprecedented global reach. It has also allowed organised syndicates to perpetrate scams on an industrial scale, with sophisticated hierarchies and divisions of labour, at a very quick pace. Scam syndicates even subcontract niche tasks, like the recruitment of money mules, to vendors.
23. We have been having a problem with scams, which I will speak to you about in a moment, where scams have been at an all-time high two years ago. Many of them proliferated and perpetrated through the use of individuals who lend their phones, lend their bank accounts, give up their SIM cards, and so on.
24. These scams, enabled by technology, have become an increasingly profitable criminal activity.
25. The threat of course has only grown with the adventof AI, and AI is developing at a breakneck speed. We all saw ChatGPT, and we were wowed by it some four years ago. But today, if you look at the first version, you would think it is so antiquated and so archaic. I hazard to think that in 5 to 10 years’ time, the system will be extremely sophisticated.
26. By using AI, today’s scammers can create convincing deceptions at scale with increasing believability. They can weaponise data to identify potential targets. Unfortunately, cybercrime is very lucrative. INTERPOL estimates that AI-enhanced fraud is 4.5 times more profitable than the traditional methods. It’s a little wonder that you can do so and you can do so in the comfort of your own home, your own bedroom, sitting in a different country.
27. Collectively, this gives rise to what I think is the central paradox of us in Singapore and of our age. Singapore’s greatest strengths – openness, a digitally advanced society and a globally interconnected economy – today are also our biggest vulnerabilities. The same technology that powers our economy is the very same technology that bad actors to weaponise against us.
28. In Singapore, it is an acute problem. Our high level of internet connectivity gives scammers easy access to victims through social media (which is increasingly prevalent), messaging apps, e-commerce platforms. Studies have found that scammers used online platforms to reach victims in 84% of all scam cases. And that gives you a rough idea of where our priorities over the last few years have been – to deal with the platforms, to look at these e-commerce platforms, the internet, social media platforms as well, and I will talk about it in a moment.
29. But first, a sense of the scale in Singapore: In 2025, victims in Singapore lost more than S$900 million in scams. For a small population like Singapore (our resident population is about 6.2 million), that is a phenomenal amount. And that is after 2024, when we were at an all-time high of S$1.1 billion. So we have brought it down slightly, and it has been very encouraging. But still, we are nowhere happy with where we were last year.
30. The same paradox applies to money laundering. Singapore’s success as an international financial, business and trade hub is underpinned by a few concepts: our political and economic stability, our strong rule of law, and our globally connected financial ecosystem.
31. Yet, these same traits make us attractive to malicious actors. They exploit our financial and corporate infrastructure to move criminal proceeds, even if the predicate offences were committed overseas – so you might have offences overseas, but proceeds move in or move through Singapore.
32. In August 2023, we saw our largest case of money-laundering to date. More than 400 police officers conducted simultaneous raids across the island in Singapore. As a result, S$3 billion in cash and assets were seized. 10 foreigners linked to organised crime were arrested. All 10 were convicted and have since been banned from re-entering Singapore, while a majority of the seized assets were then confiscated.
33. Now, this operation was not an anomaly. Between January 2019 and June 2024, we seized around S$6 billion in similar type of proceeds, linked to criminal and money-laundering activities.
34. These figures themselves speak to the scale of the problem that we face, but also to Singapore’s resolve to pursue maximum asset recovery, to cripple, if not at least deter, the activities here in Singapore. Unfortunately, money laundering makes crime very profitable and sustainable. And money laundering is the proceeds of crime from different genre of crimes – it can be child or people trafficking; it can be drug trafficking; it can be cyber or internet scams.
35. White-collar crime is therefore not a problem that is new to Singapore. It is just that the methods by which it is deployed are increasingly novel. At the same time, it is also not a problem unique to Singapore; it is a global scourge that costs the world economy trillions every year.
36. The UNODC estimates that 2-5% of global GDP, which amounts to US$800 billion to US$2 trillion roughly, is laundered every year. INTERPOL estimates that around US$2 to 3 trillion of illicit proceeds are channelled through the global financial system annually.
37. But I think the damage runs deeper than just financial loss. With every such crime being perpetrated, and where the bad actors are not apprehended and syndicates not crippled, white-collar crime does something more insidious to us. It erodes our trust in governments, in institutions, in the police, in law and order, and also in the case of scams, creates social unrest. I have seen many cases where as members of parliament, we see our constituents every week at regular clinic sessions. Often, I see a senior person with the family come in, and they lost all their lifelong savings, and you can see the tension that affects the whole family. You see families break down. It’s also a social scourge for all of us.
38. For lawyers, regulators and law enforcement agencies, this creates a new set of challenges: Questions of jurisdiction – how do we gather evidence? How do we prosecute these cases? How do we asset trace, which is important? How do we look at beneficial ownership? All of these issues have become a lot more complex.
39. Investigations, too, must now move at a comparable, if not faster, pace, even though legal processes sometimes move a little bit more slowly.
40. But this widening gap between the speed and scale of crime, and the speed and scale of response, must be closed. This, I think, has become one of the most defining challenges of our time.
Singapore’s response to white-collar crime
41. In my view, an effective response to the challenges of speed, scale and geography of technology-enabled crime, must be undergirded by three broad principles:
a. First, legal agility. The law must serve the people, must serve the purpose and must deliver practical outcomes. And if it is not working, or not working well enough, or not responding to current trends, then we must change it.
b. Second, operational integration. As scams and crime evolve, and as I said earlier, they move from one to another almost seamlessly, we too must change. We must not take a narrow view of what the response must look like. We cannot operate in silos, and that is why, in my other hat as the Second Minister for Home Affairs, we have over the last 10 to 15 years slowly but very effectively integrated the different arms of our law enforcement. Whether it is dealing with drugs, white-collar crimes, blue-collar crimes, or gambling, all of that has come closer together – along with looking after our borders as well.
c. Third, public trust and resilience. This is a partnership. We cannot do what we do without the buy-in of the public. We need constantly to have public trust, build up education and strengthen the resilience of trust in institutions. This allows us to actively do crime prevention and crime-fighting, which I believe is a whole-of-society effort.
42. We have put these principles into practice by enhancing our legislative framework; enhancing our operational capabilities on the ground; and finally, through public education. I thought I will break this down and share some of these efforts with you.
Enhancing Singapore’s legislative framework
43. First, advancing our legislative frameworks.
44. In the digital space, we must move fast, with increasingly innovative solutions. Singapore aims to stay ahead of the curve by systematically building our framework, layer by layer, with the aim of future-proofing our levers and tools to meet evolving threats.
45. For example, money-laundering often spans many actors operating from different jurisdictions.
46. Prosecutors faced real evidential hurdles. Money mules would simply say they did not know they were handling criminal proceeds. In many cases, you can see it is fairly obvious: somebody who has a monthly income of a couple of thousands suddenly gets lots of money coming through into the account. They say, I did not know, I knew that these were the sums coming in, I thought I was doing someone a favour, but I did not know what the proceeds were or where the money came from. The other hurdle that we face: it is often difficult to prove a foreign offence in court.
47. So, a few years ago, largely lessons from what we do as we surveil developments around the world and also lessons from the number of money-laundering cases that we have apprehended in the last few years, we introduced new offences of “rash” and “negligent” money-laundering.
48. If the predicate offence occurred abroad, prosecutors need not now prove a causal direct link between the monies and the foreign offence, which is often a big hurdle. We only needed to prove that the accused knew, or had reason to believe, that the money was tainted.
49. The accused person can still come to Court to persuade the Court that, for example, any suspicions he might have had were dispelled after he made reasonable further inquiries, or that there were no red flags that an ordinary, reasonable person would have noticed. But he can no longer avoid prosecution by simply claiming ignorance. This was something that we put in place a couple of years ago.
50. We have also amended our laws, to sharpen our abilities to detect and investigate crime in this new evolving landscape. In 2024, we empowered certain government agencies to share data with the Suspicious Transaction Reporting Office. That was important because you can no longer now look at data in isolation. You have to triangulate data, look at trends, look at different actors. Put them together by time, by geography, and by transaction. And with that, you get a better, more complete picture. We have also tightened due diligence obligations on casino operators, in line with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) standards.
51. But in an age where online crimes are rife, investigations and prosecutions are no longer enough. We know that we have got to go further upstream, and disrupt crime upstream, to effectively protect our people. To this end, we introduced several new laws in the last two to three years.
52. One was the Online Criminal Harms Act 2023 (OCHA). This Act empowers the Police to order individuals, online services or platforms to take down content, disable accounts, or block access to services, often e-commerce platforms, where their payment, methodologies and payment modules are being used for crime, before the crime materialises.
53. This was important because we found that the vast majority of the initial contact points for scammers was online, on one of these platforms. Very often, these platforms also contained advertisements that were of a scam nature. We wanted to have the ability to look at platforms, identify them ahead of time, and be prompt in taking action. So now, we have the ability to tell them to disable and remove access, or bring down the entire website altogether.
54. I must say that it has been effective because in Singapore, we have good relations with all the major platforms. So far, every direction that has been given under this Act has been complied with. Close to 99% has been complied with, so it has been effective.
55. Another new legal innovation just last year was the Protection from Scams Act 2025. Let me explain to you how this works.
56. This piece of legislation addresses a concerning trend, which we observed over the years as I mentioned earlier. More than 80% of scam reports involved self-effected transfers. You can understand how scam syndicates work. They lull you into a sense of complacency, sometimes with a distressing message or emotionally charged message; sometimes with the promise of quick gains. But whatever it is, more than 80% of such scam reports that we face came from self-effected transfers – either they gave their own bank account or they allowed their password to be given out. Oftentimes, we found that the victims were socially engineered over months, some even years, to trust the scammers deeply.
57. To give you one example: we had a victim. The family member made the report, and the victim was called upon by the police to the station for an interview. The victim was so ensconced and trusted the scammer so much that after the interview, the victim reported the interview to the scammer and said that she was brought into a room by some fictious people. Actually, this person was in a police station. So you can see that the whole psychology really have them wrapped around the scammers.
58. In such cases, our officers expend a lot of time and persuasion, to gain the victims’ trust, and stop the scam.
59. So, we needed a lever – something that could disrupt and pause the continued victimisation. Many of them transfer not a large sum immediately, but over time: $500 in the first week $1,000 in the second week, next month $2,000 and then $2,000 again for a few months, and then $5,000, $10,000. After a while, it becomes a lot of money. So we needed something that could pause this stream.
60. The Protection from Scams Act does this. It empowers the Police to issue Restriction Orders, which restrict the victims’ banking and credit facilities for 30 days. Orders can only be extended up to five times.
61. This measure is, no doubt, interventionist. It does disrupt the victims’ freedom to deal with their own property – in this case, usually the bank accounts.
62. But it works. I thought to illustrate it with one other example. There is a case of a lady – let’s call her “Mrs Phua”.
63. In April 2025, the Police discovered a scam against this lady who was 75 years old. Scammers used AI over time to cultivate her, to get into her psychology and develop a relationship. They used AI to impersonate Elon Musk, to talk to her, to make friends with her. “Elon Musk” also very generously introduced her to his best friends, “Donald Trump” and “Mark Zuckerberg”. She believed it entirely. Over the years, Mrs Phua transferred in total $600,000 of her savings from a joint account that she had with her 83-year-old husband, to save “Elon Musk’’s company. When the scam was uncovered, and this is the key, Mrs Phua could not be persuaded that it was a scam. She was deeply convinced. Even her own family, her daughters, were unable to persuade her that she had been scammed.
64. So, as a last resort, the Police issued a Restriction Order for her accounts in July 2025. This was then extended 5 times, until January of this year.
65. Eventually, Mrs Phua was diagnosed with psychosis in late 2025. But the key is that the Restriction Order gave her family time to slow down the transfers, stop the money from being completely drained, and meanwhile, find a way to seek medical help for her.
66. That was two of the more recent examples of legislation.
Enhancing operational capabilities
67. Let me now turn to how we have enhanced our operational capabilities against white-collar crime.
68. First, we need a future-ready force – one that is always looking beyond the horizon to understand how scammers operate, what are their modus operandi, what are their tools, and to see whether those tools can be something we can use as well.
69. So we develop our own frontline tech, like the AI-powered recursive Machine-Learning Site Evaluator. It is a bot that trawls the internet every day, continuously, 24/7, to identify potential scam sites, and blocks them at scale. Of course, when we block one, five pop up. But with every one that we block, we manage to block victims in Singapore from accessing them. It is a plus so we keep trying. This bot is quite powerful. Together with other similar tools, the bot can autonomously analyse over 400,000 websites daily. So it is a big-scale exercise.
70. We have also been building a cyber-ready force, that is capable of responding comprehensively to scams and cybercrime. After we saw the lessons learned and saw the rise in the scale of scam victims and scam amounts in Singapore, we consolidated our anti-scam and cybercrime capabilities under a dedicated Cyber Command. In fact, this Cyber Command just started operations last week.
71. The Command will deploy the latest technology, to make sense of cyberspace. As I mentioned, collating all information and triangulating them is most important. The aim being to detect scam infrastructure, malicious campaigns and threat actors – and hopefully disrupt them faster than the scammers can set them up.
72. But no enforcement agency, however capable, can combat white-collar crime alone. Evidence of white-collar crime is often scattered across multiple institutions and jurisdictions. Effective enforcement requires us to connect the dots. For this, collaboration is key.
73. The Anti-Scam Command (ASCom), which is part of the Cyber Command today, is perhaps one of the best examples of our collaborative posture.
74. ASCom partners with the private and public sectors to combat scams. If you think of scams, besides the victims with the bank accounts, the perpetrators will likely take advantage of other institutions like banks and telcos. You cannot do the scam without getting the banks involved, and you cannot get the scam without the telco being involved because most of these are transacted through the phones.
75. So as of 2025, ASCom has built up a relationship with about 180 partners – financial institutions, fintech companies, cryptocurrency houses, INTERPOL, and of course, overseas law enforcement agencies as well.
76. But what is novel, and I saw this when I visited the ASCom some months ago, was the co-location at the ASCom of the Police. The cyber-technologists, as well as staff of the seven of the most commonly used banks in Singapore, are physically located at the same space at the ASCom, alongside staff from online platforms like Shopee or Carousell.
77. So we have a coordinated effort. The Police is literally a shoulder tap away from the banks. Every time they pick up a report, they understand that the scam potentially has been perpetrated, they tap on the shoulder of the bank, and ask if they can freeze the account. It is not failsafe, because sometimes, it is faster than that even, but it is a big disruptor, a bit of sand in the system for the scammers.
78. Information sharing is therefore as immediate as possible, and action is also as immediate as possible. Once the Police receives a report alleging a scam, the bank staff literally right next to them can then block the transaction, trace the flow of funds in real time, and identify other suspicious accounts. Again, because the threat actor does not just work with one bank but across several different banks, having that coordinated information will be very useful.
79. Another facet of collaboration, of course, is international cooperation. Criminals exploit borders. They rely on information asymmetries and regulatory arbitrage, to conceal crimes and to move assets.
80. Our objective is to deny the criminals this advantage, by closing the information gaps, and strengthening cross-border operational capabilities. Our message is a simple one: crossing a border does not make you – or your assets – untraceable or untouchable. I think that is a very important message because within minutes oftentimes, the proceeds of the scam are transferred to a different country.
81. Singapore has been an active member of the FATF, and the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering. In fact, we served as FATF President from 2022 to 2024. Such collaboration has been critical, especially to asset recovery, which is a key priority in our anti-money laundering framework2.
82. Singapore is also involved in cross-border initiatives, such as Project FRONTIER+, which brings together, as of May 2026, the anti-scam units of 14 jurisdictions. They engage in real-time intelligence-sharing, even in peacetime and outside of the occurrence of a particular scam and joint enforcement operations, to take down syndicates and recover scam-related funds.
83. Project FRONTIER+ was only established 2 years ago but has already demonstrated real and tangible success. Last year, the authorities in the framework conducted two joint operations, seizing about S$28 million from about 36,000 different bank accounts, across seven different jurisdictions. More than 2,100 scam perpetrators were then arrested as a result of this collaboration.
84. Complementing such multilateral initiatives is, of course, the bilateral mutual legal assistance (MLA). Pursuant to MLA requests between 2020 and 2024, Singapore assisted other countries in recovering close to S$800 million and other assets. In one case, our Police seized about US$3.5 million within a day, and following investigations, repatriated another US$3.8 million from four bank accounts in Singapore.
85. But it is not, as I had emphasised, a one-way street. It is a two-way street. It is collaborative. We have also benefitted from the goodwill and the assistance of other countries. In the same period, we ourselves have made 110 MLA requests, pursuing a total of S$144.5 million in overseas assets. I am quite heartened to say that through such cooperation, we secured the return of almost a third of the amounts that we have put up for assistance, about S$50 million in the recovery.
86. Such international cooperation is valuable to us, and we want to work hard at making it more effective. As you know today, multilateralism is critically important. I think we need to keep to a global rules-based system that is multilateral in nature. Thus, in 2024, we amended our laws, to allow enforcement agencies to act pre-emptively, to seize or confiscate assets; and expand the situations in which we may assist foreign investigations, or enforce foreign orders.
87. We specifically put that into our own domestic legislation to allow us to be more effective, as we play our part in enhancing global international collaborative efforts. At the same time, we maintained robust legal safeguards, to provide sufficient protections for the parties to raise defences in court.
88. One final point on collaboration: I would say that in fact, what we have today in this room is an example of that collaboration. I think bringing people together – exchanging thought leadership, networking in person – is particularly important. It is always important to be able to pick up the phone and call another practitioner in a different jurisdiction halfway across the world.
89. We develop rules consistently so that we preclude, or at least reduce, the disparity or the arbitrage that criminals can take advantage of, and of course, we enhance standards. As we have heard from Melba Pearson (Chair of the ABA Criminal Justice Section) earlier, how do we challenge assumptions, and how do we build something that is global in terms of a rules-based framework that allows us to respond more effectively to such scams?
90. On that note, I am very happy to see ABA here, and I hope that we can continue with that relationship and anchor that thought leadership in Asia as well.
Public education measures against scams and money-laundering
91. Finally, a little bit about public education. We believe that for all the efforts that we have put in on laws, on technology, and on collaboration, the public is really our first line of defence, especially when it comes to scams. No legal framework or enforcement agency can eliminate white-collar crime. If the public is not themselves attuned to the risks, it will be very hard to avoid these risks.
92. The scam cases I described earlier remind us that sophisticated criminals succeed when trust is manipulated, and vigilance is lowered. As such, we have undertaken a slew of public education campaigns, to build awareness and, more importantly, vigilance.
93. One move was the Scam Public Education Office. We literally set up an office to deal with education on scams. We launched this some three years ago in 2023. This Office works with both the private sector as well as community agencies, to tailor anti-scam education to different segments of the population. Sometimes you do need to speak in the vernacular, in different languages. Sometimes you need to reach out and segment your outreach efforts - the elderly different from the younger ones, and to deal with it in a fun way. For the young especially, it can be viral on social media. It has been an effort, one that we are still learning about, but I think it is important.
94. The Police also publish a weekly Scams Bulletin, providing timely, bite-sized updates on the top five scams each week. We developed in-house an app. We call it the ScamShield. The app is iterative. Every time we pick up reports on scam numbers or scam websites, we feed that into the ScamShield database, and it goes out to all the individuals who have downloaded the app on their phones. The app then actively blocks these websites and numbers on those phones. So those numbers cannot call these individuals, and those websites cannot be accessed. Despite that, we still see many cases, but these are all part of the efforts that we take.
Conclusion
95. Finally, let me end off the session by underscoring a few things. We have spent our first few decades on nation building. We are a young country, 61 years old, building institutions for trust and stability, anchored on the rule of law. But I think our challenge, and for all of you as well in other countries, is now perhaps shifting and different. In a world where criminals evolve their methods faster than ever before, we must demonstrate that the rule of law, that we have used and relied on, will be capable of adapting to the challenges of the new digital age. It will not, as I had mentioned right at the start, be effective if it is not fit for purpose, or fit for today’s use. After a while, it will lose its salience.
96. In an era where trust in global institutions and the international rules-based order is under strain, our collective commitment to fight this internationally is itself a demonstration that multilateral cooperation really works – there is no better demonstration than in cross-border scams, and that it delivers concrete benefits to individuals.
97. But before I end, I want to say that I saw the programme, and I understand you are going to be given an optional guided tour of the Rule of Law exhibition. I hope you will not make it optional. This exhibition was specially curated for our bicentennial, organised by the Supreme Court as well as the Singapore Academy of Law, to commemorate this year. It traces our history, how we have evolved over the years, and how Singapore has developed our own jurisprudence, our legal system, and our own form of laws that fit our own society. Because ultimately, the law that we enact is a reflection of the social mores and values of this society, the social compact that we build and want to see for Singapore. This exhibition explains a lot of that. It is a wonderful exhibition. I saw it, and it does aim to convey to our community and engage them on how our legal system has evolved to meet societal needs.
98. So I hope you find some time for this in your schedule. On that note, I wish you a really productive, fruitful and lovely two days. Melba says you are exactly at the right place. I would underscore that. Do not forget to make some time to see a bit of Singapore. Thank you very much.
1. Julie Ray, “More People Feel Safe Even As Global Conflict Rise”, Diplomatic Courier (7 October 2025), available at https://www.diplomaticourier.com/posts/more-people-feel-safe-even-as-global-conflicts-rise.↩
2. National Asset Recovery Strategy, at [2.3.1].↩
Last updated on 13 July 2026