Manager jailed 18 months for fraudulent registration of prepaid SIM cards
SIM cards. Photo: Reuters
SINGAPORE — A man who fraudulently registered 707 prepaid SIM cards to help his firm qualify for incentives from telcos was on Wednesday (May 11) sentenced to 18 months’ jail.
Wong Kok Leong, 41, used identification documents belonging to foreigners to register for the SIM cards in less than three months after his director told him to do so.
Formerly the manager of telecommunications retailer Gadget 3, Wong was jailed for his part in the scheme even though the court acknowledged that he acted on his superior’s instructions.
He pleaded guilty to 235 counts of unauthorised modification of computer material, or abetting the commission of such, and 472 charges were taken into consideration during sentencing.
Court proceedings for Gadget 3’s director Wong Yat Sung, 44, is pending, while another conspirator, the firm’s 25-year-old sales assistant Yau Chee Fun, has not been charged in court.
Sometime in May and June 2013, Wong was told by his director that Gadget 3 would qualify for incentives if it met certain sales targets set by the major telcos here.
He was told, for instance, that for each prepaid SIM card sold, Singtel would offer an incentive of S$2.50 while StarHub would pay S$2. Both also offered bonus incentives for retailers that hit a certain sales quota.
Wong was then instructed by his director to get hold of each foreign customer’s passport image to make extra SIM card registrations.
In all, 707 prepaid cards were registered under Gadget 3’s name between July 23 and Oct 6 that year with 141 subscribers of foreign nationalities, the court was told.
Investigations also revealed that several of these cards were used to facilitate unlicensed moneylending offences.
Urging the court to impose a “stiff custodial sentence”, Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Sanjiv Vaswani said that the sheer number of offences by Wong paints a picture of an offender who “has engaged in a sustained period of similar criminal conduct”.
His and his conspirators’ actions undermined the purpose behind the registration regime for prepaid SIM cards, DPP Sanjiv said, noting that the authorities reduced the number of prepaid SIM cards per subscriber from 10 to three in 2014 to “ensure the security of the regime”.
Their actions also greatly inconvenienced the unsuspecting Gadget 3 customers whose identities were stolen to fraudulently register the SIM cards, and these individuals had to be investigated for crimes they did not commit, DPP Sanjiv said.
Wong could have been jailed up to three years and/or fined S$15,000 for each charge of unauthorised modification of computer material.
