Thanks to the multitude of dating websites and apps, finding love has never been easier. But in Singapore, online dating has given rise to a darker side - online love scams. Though women know of the existence of these scams, most believe this could never happen to them.

NCPC wanted to create awareness that no one is immune to online love scams and empower the audience to recognize the signs of a scam early to avoid falling for it.

Over the years, anti-scam advertising has become a blind spot for the audience. In order to create the right impact, we wanted to do things differently and chose to mask our film as a love story and not a scam story.

Taking inspiration from real stories of scam, we wanted the audience to see a scam unfold from the eyes of the victim and that it can happen to anyone.

Our creative idea uses the susceptible imagination of women looking for love on line. Women who place their profiles on dating sites hoping to find the one. We show the story of one such woman who thinks she has met her match made in heaven. Only to then turn it on its head. The idea is to ignite their awareness of the situation they may find themselves in, if they do in deed think they have found love on the internet. For, unfortunately, too often in everyday life the fairy tale ending they were hoping for from the dating site can turn into something far, far worse.

In spite of increased public awareness of online scams, the number of incidents have increased by 20% YOY since 2018. Singaporean women are aware of scams, yet they fall prey because of a sense of invulnerability.

Using behavioural science approach to change mindset, we chose to move away from advertising that leads with warning or fear to caution against scams. We used Kahneman’s “System 1 & System 2” thinking to understand the audience and their behavioural nuances. The target is in her late 30s, professionally accomplished, confident and self-aware. For online love scams, these are not decisions that the victims make logically, they are made emotionally.

Anti-scam advertising often becomes a blind spot, we needed to cut through the clutter and reach an emotive wavelength that would make victims and potential victims see themselves in the commercial and thereby spot the signs.

Launched on 20th November, 2020, the film will play across National Crime Prevention Council’s social channels – Facebook, Youtube etc.

The film will run until the end of next year.

Since launch on November 20th the film has amassed a total of 722,916 views on YouTube and FB and the total number of impressions is 1,638,078.

Overall view rate is at 42.36%, which is around the WOG benchmark of 42.65%.

This campaign has just launched, and so the numbers haven’t been properly formulated yet.