Imagine this: you’ve come to Singapore from abroad after an agent promised to invest in your business.
You fly down and attend some finance talks and workshops before visiting the agent’s fancy office to sign contracts for the money.
All that’s left to do is transfer a relatively small administrative fee, and you’d get the investment funds soon.
But the funds never come, and the agent is unreachable.
Sounds like a nightmarish scenario, right? Well, that’s exactly what happened to ten businessmen recently.
Chinese National Scammed 10 Businessmen of S$2.5M Scam
The ten high net-worth businessmen—nine Chinese nationals and one South Korean—all owned businesses in China and were looking for more capital to expand their business.
They approached a China-based agent who provided them with contacts of 44-year-old Chinese national Wei Yong, known as “David” to the men, as well as contacts of his accomplices.
Unbeknownst to them, “David” wasn’t interested in their business at all, and was out to scam them instead.
Wei’s victims would be invited to attend talks and workshops related to finance, investment opportunities, and business expansion in China, Singapore, and the US.
Wei and his accomplices flew the businessmen to their “business office” located at the Marina Bay Financial Centre, where they were supposed to conduct negotiations.
What they didn’t know, was that this office, which was made up of boardrooms and meeting rooms, was leased out on a daily-rented basis. Wei and his accomplices rented the space and even dressed professionally to make their claims more believable.
At the office, located on the 11th floor of Marina Bay Financial Centre Tower 1, the businessmen signed contracts purporting to be investment agreements.
After signing the contracts and returning to China, they would be contacted and instructed on how to transfer “administrative fees” which would supposedly facilitate the fundraising process.
The victims each paid fees ranging from 100,000 yuan to 2.65 million yuan, thinking the investment funds would be far higher.
But those funds never came, and the members of the syndicate became unreachable.
Jailed 12 Years & One Month
Wei was sentenced to jail for 12 years and one month on Monday (19 April), after pleading guilty to five charges, including four counts of cheating.
He also faced one count under the Passport Act as he was found with a fake Myanmar passport after he tried to enter Singapore with it in November 2019.
It turns out that the scam had started in 2017.
Wei was an odd-job worker in Hubei and Beijing in China before he joined the syndicate.
In total, Wei and his accomplices scammed the 10 businessmen out of more than S$2.5 million in total.
Wei was apparently a regular patron of the casinos at Marina Bay Sands and Resort World Sentosa and gambled away most of his share of criminal proceeds there.
Between May 2015 and November 2019 alone, he had transacted some S$30 million at the casinos.
Feature Image: PhuShutter / Shutterstock.com
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