My son lost $15,000 to scammers in one night

He was upset with himself, but I hope the lesson he learnt is that the road ahead is always about redemption and reform

- Michael Han

In February, my son and I gave an interview on The Straits Times' In Your Opinion podcast. The topic was: "Do Gen Zs really tackle life, work differently compared with their parents?"

My son told journalist Lynda Hong that he ended up as the victim of a scam while surfing mindlessly on the internet.

I was rather surprised that he shared it. It happened in the middle of 2024 and we had been keeping it within the family to respect his privacy.

When I asked him why he had talked about it, he said he had learnt a costly lesson and wanted to pass it along.

He also wanted to move on, and sharing was one way of taking that definitive step.

Here is an excerpt of what he shared in the podcast.

Son: It was quite bad. How I lost the money was because I was greedy. I went for something I could not afford.

The long story short, how the scam works is that you put in an amount of money as a deposit and they make you do all these surveys.

After that, in the middle of all these surveys, they drop this thing called a bomb, and make you pay a bit more.

The catch is you cannot get your deposit back until you complete all the surveys.

When you complete the surveys and you cash in, you supposedly get a profit.

There are different tiers and I went for the tier I could not afford, because I just wanted more. I was greedy and I put in more and more. It came to a point where I lost everything. The more I wanted, the less I got. It's as simple as that.

Hong: How much did you lose, if you don't mind saying?