"These actions were taken at various stages during the month as the phishing scams built up. OCBC should however have responded faster and more robustly at the first sign of the scams, which the bank had picked up in early December," the minister said. By the time OCBC informed the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on Dec 24 that it had activated its incident response team, the bank's call centre was "overwhelmed". "It faced a surge in calls – from affected customers as well as other worried customers who had not themselves received phishing messages.