Ex-tutor gets jail for siphoning off S$14,000 from tuition centre, using roommate's bank card to buy S$20,000 worth of Apple products

SINGAPORE — After unintentionally getting involved with what he claimed were "scammers", a mathematics tuition teacher sought to solve his financial problems by misappropriating tuition fees collected from his students.

He also used his roommate's debit card to buy close to S$20,000 worth of Apple products to resell.

Yeap Han Jiang, 29, was sentenced to 13 months' jail on Wednesday (Nov 15) after pleading guilty to committing criminal breach of trust and cheating.

Another charge for committing forgery was taken into consideration during sentencing.

The court heard that from Oct 23 last year to Jan 8 this year, the Malaysian was employed as a mathematics teacher and operation executive at JEI Learning Centre, where he would collect tuition fees from clients on behalf of the centre.

These clients were parents of students he taught and he would communicate with them using the centre's mobile phone to inform them about upcoming payments of tuition fees.

The payment would be made by cash or through internet banking to the centre's bank account.

TOOK TUITION FEES FROM 24 CLIENTS

Between November and December last year, Yeap dishonestly misappropriated a total of S$14,165 in tuition fees paid by 24 clients to the centre.

Yeap would request early fee payments and issue fake invoices to the clients.

Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Timothy Lee said that some of the clients paid Yeap cash, while others made payment directly to his personal bank account, which he provided.

Yeap even issued QR codes linked to his personal bank account for them to use.

He would then delete his messages with the clients from the company phone that showed the communication between them.

Using the money he collected, he would pay off debts to the "scammers".

On Jan 8 this year, Mr Hiak Tai Keat, the director of JEI Learning Centre, confronted Yeap with evidence of his wrongdoing and asked that he repaid the money he took.

It was then that Yeap admitted to his offences and Mr Hiak made a police report the next day.

Court documents did not disclose if Yeap was arrested but a full restitution has since been made to the centre.

USING ROOMMATE'S BANK CARD TO SHOP

Sometime between October and November last year, Yeap temporarily moved in with an acquaintance, Mr Lim Kean Seng.

Around Nov 2, Yeap found Mr Lim's wallet on a table and decided to take the debit card from his wallet to key in the card details into his own account for Shopee, an e-retail site.

On 25 occasions between Nov 2 and 16, Yeap used the ShopeePay digital pay wallet in the Shopee mobile application to buy Apple products worth a total of S$19,728.99 from an iStudio store, DPP Lee said. These were paid using the roommate's card linked to the digital wallet.

Yeap later sold the products to secondhand dealers.

Mr Lim, who had already made a police report about suspicious transactions on his card on Nov 15, then reached out to the police again on April 27 this year after Yeap confessed to using his card to make the transactions.

Yeap has not paid back the money to Mr Lim to date.

PANICKED AT WHAT HE THOUGHT WAS A SCAM

During his mitigation plea, Yeap apologised for his actions and told the court that he committed the offences because of a "scammer issue".

He said that he had submitted all of his personal documents to what he thought was an advertisement for a DBS bank credit card application but it turned out to be a scam.

The card application later turned out to be unsuccessful and was turned into a loan, Yeap added.

When he could not cancel the loan application, Yeap panicked and decided to pay the "scammers" the purported cancellation fee because they had his addresses in Singapore and Malaysia. 

Yeap claimed that he was left with no other choices when they continued to harass him for money.

In response, DPP Lim said that if these were all true, it would explain to some extent Yeap's motive but it was unclear if all of the money was used to pay the people who would presumably have been from an unlicensed moneylender. 

For committing criminal breach of trust, Yeap could have been jailed for up to 15 years and fined.

For cheating, he could have been jailed for up to 10 years and fined.