S’porean who sold identities of SingPass users jailed 5 years, 2 months
James Sim Guan Liang enters court on Jan 25, 2016. Photo: Jason Quah/TODAY
SINGAPORE — For cracking SingPass accounts to aid a China-based identity trafficking syndicate, James Sim Guan Liang was sentenced to five years and two months’ jail on Thursday (March 24), with the district judge describing his crime akin to breaking into a house hundreds of times.
Sim, 39, had pleaded guilty to “harvesting” the login credentials of 293 SingPass users and selling their personal data to the syndicate, which used these to help Chinese nationals enter Singapore under false pretences.
Twenty-three applications were successful, and of these, 20 Chinese nationals entered Singapore.
Three of them subsequently committed criminal offences here — including overstaying and harassment charges — and were dealt with and repatriated.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Jeremy Lua had urged the court to impose a jail term of five to six years on Sim.
The case of identity theft by an individual who exploited the SingPass system is unprecedented in its scale, the prosecutor said.
Sim had made tens of thousands of attempts to gain unauthorised access to SingPass accounts, successfully cracking hundreds.
He had obtained the personal details of these people because they used their NRIC number as their password for their SingPass login credentials, and he systematically changed the last one or two digits and suffix of NRIC numbers in running sequence to gather more credentials.
Sim’s lawyer Louis Joseph argued that a three-year jail term would be appropriate, noting that Sim earned only about S$1,500 from his crimes.
But District Judge Low Wee Ping said Sim’s harvesting of hundreds of SingPass accounts is “no different from breaking into a house” hundreds of times. The SingPass system is a “vital part of the Singapore Government’s information technology structure”, the judge said, adding that “the whole nation relies on it”.
“For you to expose hundreds of users to potential harm is reckless and unconscionable,” said District Judge Low, noting that without Sim’s help in stealing the identities of SingPass users, the syndicate would have been handicapped. “If you did not sell (the data), the crimes would have been a non-starter.”
As for Sim’s assertion that he had only made S$1,500 out of the operation, the judge said: “When I rob a bank and (only steal) S$10, that means I shouldn’t be punished for bank robbery since I only got S$10?”
The identities of those from the syndicate remain unknown.
For each of his charges for unauthorised access, Sim could have been jailed up to two years and fined S$5,000. CHANNEL NEWSASIA
