€16.4 million in damages claimed.
Two banks. Not one straight answer.
Investment Scam Asia documents a coordinated fraud network that moved victim funds through accounts held at UOB and OCBC. Every case here is backed by bank wires, transfer instructions, and order confirmations — not allegations.
We’ve filed formal pre-action demands with both banks. What came back does not engage with what we put to them — partial replies, points we never raised, and positions the documents already contradict. This is the public record of that exchange.
Our mission: bank accountability, an end to the double standard, and fair compensation for victims — the UK’s shared-responsibility model, applied globally.
UOB and OCBC won’t be the first banks to pay. They’ll just be the last to admit it.
Banks have started to accept liability. Some are already making payments to victims — including OCBC itself. The question was never whether banks can make victims whole. It’s whether UOB and OCBC will do it without being made to.
- →OCBC has already paid out once. After the 2022 SMS phishing scam, OCBC completed S$13.7 million in goodwill payouts to 790 customers by the end of January 2022 — victims made whole within weeks. A precedent OCBC set for itself.
- →Courts are ordering it. In Chan Yan Li v Maybank, the Kuala Lumpur Sessions Court ruled on 4 May 2026 that the bank must pay the victim RM166,000 plus RM15,000 in costs, finding it should have flagged the unusual transaction pattern. It is believed to be the first case in Malaysia where a scam victim successfully challenged unauthorised transactions on this basis.
- →The law already requires it. Singapore’s Protection from Scams Act 2025 — passed in January 2025 and in force since 1 July 2025 — lets police order a bank to restrict an account where a scam transfer is suspected. This is not pending legislation: the Ministry of Home Affairs reported at least 12 restriction orders issued under it by March 2026.
Where things stand with the banks
- UOB SingaporeResponsive
- OCBC SingaporeNo response
Where the money went — and who let it move.
Both banks held the accounts that received victim funds. Both were formally notified. Neither has resolved a single case on this list.
United Overseas Bank
- Direct loss (principal transferred)€2.15M
- Consequential damages claimed€4.08M
- Victims with UOB-linked losses20
- Formal demand sent05 May 2026
- Response statusEngaging — in dialogue
OCBC Bank
- Direct loss (principal transferred)€3.86M
- Consequential damages claimed€6.27M
- Victims with OCBC-linked losses46
- Formal demand sent18 Jun 2026
- Response statusNo response
Know your rights — see how we’re holding banks accountable.
This is what happens to a real person.
Not a hypothetical. This is the pattern behind every one of the 188 transactions in our database — and at every step, a real bank made a choice.
A fake firm, built to look real
A transnational crime syndicate builds an investment firm from scratch — or quietly copies a real one. A polished website. Fake credentials. The promise of strong returns on IPOs and stocks that sound too good to pass up, and just plausible enough to believe.
You do your due diligence. It checks out.
You’re careful. You look them up. And then you see it: a real bank account, at a real bank — UOB or OCBC. Not some offshore shell nobody’s heard of. A name you trust. That single fact is what closes the deal — for you, and for everyone else who lost money the same way.
The bank opens the door
UOB and OCBC opened these accounts the same way they’d open one for any customer — except these customers exhibited the textbook red flags of mule accounts: newly incorporated shells, no real business behind them, funds arriving from strangers across a dozen countries and leaving again within days. The bank didn’t create the scam. But it gave the scam a bank account, and a bank account is what made it believable.
You send your money — using the bank’s own instructions
You wire your savings, or your parents’, or money you borrowed, following payment instructions issued in the bank’s name, to an account the bank itself maintains. This isn’t a stranger asking for gift cards. This is a wire transfer, bank to bank, exactly the way you’d pay for anything else legitimate.
A fake confirmation lands in your inbox
A stock purchase confirmation arrives. It looks exactly like the real thing, because it was built to. You believe you now own shares. What you actually own is a receipt for money that’s already sitting in someone else’s account — at a bank that had every tool available to notice the pattern, and didn’t stop it.
The money moves. Then it’s gone.
Within days, the funds are layered and moved out of the UOB or OCBC account and on through the network, long before you have any reason to suspect something’s wrong. By the time you do — and by the time the bank is notified — the account has already done its job. This is the moment that changes a life. It’s also the moment two banks could have stopped it, and didn’t.
More victims are coming forward every week.
If you lost money through a similar pattern — or you work in compliance, journalism, or law enforcement and want the underlying case files — get in touch. We don’t publish everything we have. Yet.