Ex-financial services manager gets jail for forgery, helping to launder S$10,000 in scam proceeds

SINGAPORE — A 55-year-old former financial services manager was sentenced to 15 weeks' jail on Wednesday (May 31) over fraudulently signing over a client when he moved to a new financial firm and helping to launder S$10,000 in scam proceeds.

Danny Lim Kok Tiong pleaded guilty to one charge of committing forgery on a payment invoice with the intention to cheat, and two charges of forging a client's signature on documents for the transfer of accounts. 

Eight other similar charges were taken into consideration during sentencing.

FORGING CLIENT'S SIGNATURE

The court heard that Lim had dishonestly forged signatures on documents in his capacity as a financial consultant.

Lim joined insurance and reinsurance broker Pana Harrison as a financial consultant in 2009, selling insurance and other investment-related products to his clients.

He would also manage some of his clients' investments through iFast, an online trading platform. This would require the client to create an investment account before a "servicing financial adviser" was assigned.

Around this time, Lim was appointed Ms Lim Chuen Chuen's servicing financial adviser.

When he left Pana Harrison in late 2019 to take up a similar role in Ray Alliance Financial Advisers, Lim asked Ms Lim to sign a "Change of servicing financial adviser" form issued by iFast so he could keep her as a client at his new employer.

However, she refused to do so. 

Ms Lim was later told that someone named Angie Quek would replace Lim as her servicing financial adviser.

Sometime in November 2020, she discovered that her servicing financial adviser was not Angie Quek, but someone else.

She raised this with the company and was told that she had signed a form granting the request for the transfer of her investment account to Lim's new employer.

Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Bryan Wong said that Lim later admitted that he had forged Ms Lim's signature on the form as he felt it was "unfair" that she had declined to switch to Ray Alliance, after the "good" investment returns under his management.

Police investigations revealed that Lim had also forged Ms Lim's signature on two other investment-related forms that were submitted on her behalf without her knowledge when he left Ray Alliance to join another firm, PIAS, as a financial services manager.

Lim had carried out similar acts of forgery with four other clients — these were taken into consideration for sentencing.

FRAUDULENT INVOICE

Investigations revealed that between May and June, 2021, an individual named Chung had approached Lim's friend Medzi with a proposition.

The offer was for Medzi to receive a "service fee" in exchange for assistance to receive money into his bank account, and remitting the funds to Malaysian bank accounts for business-related activities.

Instead of taking up the offer, Medzi told Lim about it. He explained that he was not interested as it might jeopardise a financial assistance scheme he was on if large sums of money were found to have been transferred into his bank account.

Lim decided to take up Chung's offer and was introduced to him over WhatsApp.

Lim was then paid S$1,500 in service fees. He retained S$1,000 and transferred the remaining S$500 to Medzi.

Sometime in August 2021, Chung instructed Lim to receive S$10,000 into his bank account and to transfer S$9,000 to Nur Syazwani Ismail, who was the operator of an Ambank Berhad bank account in Puchong, Malaysia.

Lim was also informed that the sum of S$10,000 was part of a larger sum of S$50,000 that was intended to be remitted to Malaysia.

However, the police found out that the S$10,000 had come from a Singaporean woman who was cheated into transferring the money to Lim's bank account on Aug 10 as part of an online scam where she was asked to pay the amount as customs-related charges to receive her package.

Chung then gave Lim an invoice for S$17,000, which the latter edited to S$9,000 to match the amount he would remit. 

NO PREVIOUS CONVICTIONS, SAYS DEFENCE

Seeking leniency on behalf of Lim, defence lawyer Dhillon Surinder Singh of Dhillon & Panoo LLC urged the court to consider a "just and appropriate" sentence as Lim had no related convictions "for 55 years of his lifetime".

In sentencing, District Judge Teoh Ai Lin noted that while two of the charges had involved "no losses suffered" by the victims, the substantial sum involved over the forged invoice required that an appropriate sentence be imposed.

Anyone found guilty of committing forgery can be jailed for up to four years or fined, or both.

Those guilty of committing forgery with the intent to cheat could be jailed for up 10 years or fined.