Former DBS officer accessed customer information and gave details to friend to compare salaries
Liong Yan Sin helped his ex-colleague retrieve salary details of the latter's new colleagues at the Ministry of Manpower for comparison.
A man using a laptop. (File photo: CNA/Jeremy Long)
SINGAPORE: A former DBS officer accessed customer information for unauthorised purposes because he was "curious", and helped his friend to check his colleagues' salaries.
Liong Yan Sin, 32, was sentenced to 16 weeks' jail for his crimes on Monday (Nov 21).
He pleaded guilty to 10 charges under the Computer Misuse Act and six charges under the Banking Act. Another 42 charges were taken into consideration.
The court heard that Liong was a collections officer at DBS between July 2016 and December 2018.
In his role, he attended to queries by bank customers, spoke to them about their outstanding payments and discussed payment plans with them.
In order to perform his job, he was given access to DBS' Customer Information System.
When Liong first joined DBS, he was told not to disclose customer information without authorisation. He was also aware that he was not supposed to access customer details which were outside the parameters of his job duties.
Despite this, Liong made unauthorised searches in the system for customer details. He did so for customers whose names he had chanced upon in online forums, or to check the details belonging to his friends or relatives.
He made 10 such searches in 2018.
EX-COLLEAGUE WANTED TO KNOW NEW COLLEAGUES' SALARIES
Liong's co-accused, Dinath Silvamany Muthalliyar, previously worked with Liong at DBS. However, Dinath changed jobs and went to work with the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) as a levy administration manager.
From June 2018, Dinath began asking Liong to find out the salary details of Dinath's colleagues at MOM. Dinath wanted to ascertain his standing at MOM, and to know the difference between his salary and the salaries earned by his peers.
Liong agreed to Dinath's requests and gave Dinath the salary details of customers that he had retrieved without authorisation from the DBS system on five occasions.
Liong got acquainted with his second co-accused, Ang Kok How, through gambling, basketball and drinking. The two men also knew a woman named "Kelly".
Kelly began borrowing money from Ang to play poker and owed Ang about S$23,000 by September 2018. She paid him back a small sum but became uncontactable that month.
Ang asked Liong for help to contact Kelly, and Liong conducted searches in the DBS system for customer details belonging to Kelly. He gave the details to Ang via WhatsApp.
DBS caught wind of the offences and lodged a police report in 2018.
The prosecutor asked for 20 weeks' jail, pointing to Liong's abuse of position and trust. However, he noted that none of the customers involved reported any harassment or intimidation by Dineth or Ang.
Liong's lawyer said his client was extremely remorseful, had pleaded early and cooperated. He also had no previous convictions.
Liong was allowed to defer his jail term to December.
