Why checking for news and reviews can save you from investment scams

Many of us scour the web to check user reviews before we pick our next TV series, the right gadget to buy or the restaurant to eat at, yet when it comes to investments, we often shoot first and ask questions later.

- Tan Ooi Boon

It's not hard to see why – greed and the fear of losing out often cloud the mind and make victims jump headlong into a deal without doing the most basic checks.

For instance, scammers like to create fake news by misusing the names of celebrities, political leaders and logos of news media to trumpet fictitious endorsement of investment products.

If potential victims had done basic checks, they would probably have stumbled onto the police advisory and probably several genuine online news reports exposing such dubious deals.

Yet many people, here and abroad, continue to fall for investment scams because they fail to make the checks that could save them from huge losses.

Some gullible investors in Singapore lost more than $30 million in just over a month earlier this year after being duped by fake deals.

If people continue to think that it is easy to strike it rich without checking whether a deal is genuine, more money will likely go down the drain because scammers have started to use AI-generated deepfake technology.