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SINGAPORE — The Ministry of Health (MOH) has warned the public to be wary of scammers using automated voice calls or impersonating health officials to obtain personal information from victims during the Covid-19 outbreak. 

In a Facebook post on Friday (March 27), MOH said the scammers pretended to be ministry employees or part of a contact-tracing team. They would then ask victims to provide personal information, such as financial details, or to collect documents from the ministry.

MOH clarified that it would not request financial details during contact-tracing or ask people without existing matters with the ministry to collect documents from it.

The ministry also advised people to verify the authenticity of phone calls by calling the MOH hotline on 1800 333 9999.

In its advisory, MOH added that it is “good practice to always verify the authenticity (of) instructions before offering any personal information or making payments to anyone”.

CLARIFICATION: An earlier version of this story cited an example of an alleged scam message from “COVID19SHN” which had the URL “areyouhome.sg”. The Immigration & Checkpoints Authority (ICA) has since clarified that these are legitimate messages. To help users recognise that the SMS is from an official source, the ICA said it has changed its link prefix to "areyouhome.gov.sg" and the sender to "ICA".