SINGAPORE – Technology has made life more convenient but it also poses significant risks as some use it to carry out harmful activities such as scams, and public education is key to mitigating the threats.
Second Minister for Law Edwin Tong, making this point on Sunday, also said scams, phishing and cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns do not just threaten people’s money and time.
He added: “They also undermine social cohesion when people become less trusting of one another in a society where we’re trying to make ourselves more tightly knit.”
Mr Tong, who is also Minister for Culture, Community and Youth, was speaking to around 200 lawyers who do pro bono work, partners and guests at the launch on Sunday of the eighth edition of Law Awareness Weeks@CDC (Law@CDC).
This year’s series of legal talks, aimed at equipping the public with basic legal knowledge, has a focus on cyber safety and features 11 live-streamed webinars from Sept 27 to Oct 27 on this topic and more.
Singapore saw 14,349 scam cases from January to June, up from 7,746 in the same period last year. The most common types of scams included job, phishing, e-commerce and investment scams.
Noting that online threats involve anonymous adversaries who are not bound by geography, he said: “The digital domain is fraught with danger… If one is not guided and doesn’t have access to tools and information (to protect oneself), it can be a very troubling and traumatic experience.”
He added: “Scams and…
