A Frozen Account Is Not Recovered Money

2026-09-11 · Philip Choo · AI9OS

The advice a scam victim in Singapore is most likely to meet is that they may have a civil claim in unjust enrichment and can ask a court to order the money returned.

That is true. It is also the third question, and the first two decide whether it is worth asking.

This is a note on what the provisions actually say. It is not advice on anyone's situation, and section numbers should be checked against the version in force when you rely on them.

The newest anti-scam law says what it does in its own title

The Protection from Scams Act 2025 was passed on 7 January 2025, assented to on 3 February 2025, and commenced on 1 July 2025. Its long title is one sentence:

An Act to protect persons from scams by empowering specified
officers to issue restriction orders to banks in Singapore
prohibiting certain bank transactions and the grant and use of
credit facilities temporarily.

Read that again with recovery in mind. It empowers an officer to stop your transactions and your access to credit, temporarily. It is aimed at the person who is still being scammed and has not yet accepted it.

That is a prevention statute, and it is not a criticism to say so. It is what it was built for and it says so plainly. The distinction is easy to lose in general discussion, though, and a victim who has already sent the money may be reading about a power that was designed to have stopped them rather than to bring anything back.

The power that actually freezes the money is older and sits elsewhere

Section 35 of the Criminal Procedure Code 2010 is headed Powers to seize property in certain circumstances. Subsection (1) lets a police officer seize, or prohibit dealing in, property in respect of which an offence is suspected, or which is suspected to have been used or intended to be used to commit one, or which is suspected to constitute evidence of one.

The part that matters when money has moved through a bank is subsection (2). Where the property is held in an account or a safe deposit box at a financial institution, a police officer of or above the rank of inspector may, by written order, direct the institution to deliver the property, or direct it not to allow any dealings in that account for the period specified in the order.

Two things follow that are worth holding onto.

The first is that this is the same power whichever side of the transfer you are on. It reaches the recipient's account, which is the point. It also reaches yours, if your account is suspected of being used. People whose accounts are frozen as suspected mule accounts and people whose accounts are frozen as crime scenes are looking at the same provision.

The second is that a freeze is a preservation step. Nothing about it decides where the money goes.

Release while frozen is narrow, and it is a court's decision

The Code does provide a route to get at frozen funds while matters are pending, and it is deliberately tight. A court may order a release only where it is satisfied the release is necessary for basic expenses, and the Code lists them: foodstuff, rent, discharge of a mortgage, medicine, medical treatment, taxes, insurance premiums and public utility charges. There is a separate limb for reasonable professional fees and expenses in connection with the provision of legal services, and another for routine holding or maintenance charges on the property itself.

That is a living-expenses valve. It is not a mechanism for getting your money back, and it runs through a court rather than through the investigating officer.

The route home is section 370, and its test is not "the victim"

Section 370 is headed Procedure governing seizure of property, and it is the provision that decides what happens to seized property in the end.

The officer who seized the property must report the seizure to the relevant court at the earlier of two moments: when the officer considers the property is no longer relevant to any investigation, inquiry, trial or other proceeding and the conditions in the section are met, or one year after the date of seizure.

On receiving that report the court must make such of the listed orders as apply. Where the court is satisfied an offence was committed in respect of the property, or that it was used or intended to be used to commit one, it may make such order as it thinks fit for the disposal of the property. The same applies to anything the property has been converted into or exchanged for, which is the limb that follows traceable proceeds.

And then the residual case. Where none of those apply, the order is for delivery of the property to the person entitled to possession of the property, or, if that person cannot be ascertained or cannot be found, for its custody and production.

"The person entitled to possession" is doing all the work in that sentence, and it is not a synonym for "the person who lost the money." It is a legal question. When a single mule account received transfers from several victims, was drawn down, and holds less than the sum of the claims, the question of who is entitled to possession of what remains is contested between people who are all genuinely out of pocket.

That route is not the only one. Where property is taken as the proceeds of serious crime it can pass to the State instead, and the value then goes to general revenue rather than to anyone who lost it. We set out what that looks like at scale in forfeited is not recovered.

There is one more feature worth knowing. The court must not dispose of the property while there is a pending court proceeding under any written law in relation to that property, or while it is satisfied the property is relevant to an investigation, inquiry, trial or other proceeding. So a civil claim over the same money is not running in a separate universe from the criminal process. The two interact, and the timing of one affects the other.

The civil claim is real, and the limitation folklore about it is wrong

Unjust enrichment is a genuine route, and the unjust factor in a deception case is usually mistake.

The point most often got wrong concerns time. You will frequently see it said that a civil claim in Singapore must be brought within six years. That period comes from the Limitation Act, which names actions founded on contract and on tort.

In Esben Finance Ltd and others v Wong Hou-Lianq Neil [2022] SGCA(I) 1, the court held that claims in unjust enrichment are not covered by the Limitation Act at all, and so are not statutorily time-barred. The reasoning was that the Act's wording specifies causes of action such as contract and tort and makes no mention of restitutionary claims, and that it was last overhauled in 1959, when the law of unjust enrichment was still developing.

Do not read that as permission to take your time. Not being statutorily time-barred is a narrow proposition about one statute. Equitable defences still exist, evidence still decays, and above all the money still moves. The clock that actually governs a scam recovery is dissipation, not limitation, and it runs in hours and days rather than years. The correct conclusion is that a stale claim is usually lost on the facts rather than on the statute, which is a different problem with the same outcome.

The question that decides all of it, and gets the least attention

Is the money still in Singapore?

A section 35 order is directed at a financial institution in Singapore. A section 370 disposal is a Singapore court disposing of property in Singapore. If the funds left before anything was frozen, neither provision reaches them, and no amount of being right about unjust enrichment changes that.

At that point the matter becomes a cross-border one, and it acquires a question that has nothing to do with the merits: whoever makes enquiries in the receiving jurisdiction is doing something that jurisdiction regulates, and the rules are not the same from one state to the next. Singapore licenses the function regardless of how the information was obtained. Others define it by method, or by notification rather than licence, or not at all.

That is the gap the registry exists to record, and the Singapore entry sets out what the Act here actually defines.

What to ask, before spending anything

• "Where is the money now, and on what date was that established?" Every other question is downstream of this one.
• "Has anything been frozen, under what power, and when was the seizure reported to court?" The one-year point in section 370 is a real date in a real file.
• "Am I the person entitled to possession, and who else is claiming the same funds?" If nobody has asked this, nobody has thought about the disposal stage.
• "If the money is offshore, who is doing the work there, and under what authority?" The answer should be a specific regime, not a reassurance.

What was checked, and what was not

The statutory text above was read on 11 September 2026 from Singapore Statutes Online, which reported both Acts as current as at that date. The Criminal Procedure Code provisions carry amendments from Act 24 of 2024 in force from 14 November 2024.

The case position on limitation is taken from the Singapore Judiciary's own published case brief on Esben Finance, not from a secondary summary.

Not checked, and so not asserted here: how disposal inquiries resolve competing victim claims in practice, what proportion of frozen funds is returned, and anything about how any of this interacts with a specific bank's own goodwill or reimbursement arrangements. Those are real questions and this note does not answer them.

(General information about legal provisions, not legal advice, and not a description of any service.)