If you’ve eaten at a Kopitiam before, you might be familiar with this:
Reader: Ikan Bakar with Rice? Sure, I’m familiar with it, but what does it have to do with this article?
Oh nothing, I’m just really hungry.
Reader: Stay focused, dear writer.
Ok, I apologise.
If you eat at Kopitiams often, you might be familiar with this:
Yes, it’s the Kopitiam Card. Hungry diners can use their Kopitiam cards instead of cash for a quicker, more convenient mode of payment.
But where we see a stored value card, criminals see an opportunity to make money.
Man Hacked Kopitiam Cards By ‘Coding’ $100 Value in Them & Then Selling Them Online
A former Nanyang Technological University (NTU) student has pleaded guilty to a single charge under the Computer Misuse and Cybersecurity Act after he hacked Kopitiam cards and sold them online.
29-year-old Alex Quek Wei Kai modified and sold 121 Kopitiam cards over seven weeks before he was caught.
So, how the heck did he do this?
It all started with a neighbour’s stinginess.
Quek first began researching how to modify stored value cards in 2015 when he was a first-year student in NTU.
According to TODAYonline, students staying in NTU residential halls have to pay for air-conditioning services in their rooms using stored-value cards like the Kopitiam one.
One penny-pinching neighbour asked Quek if he could modify the card so that it registered as having stored value even without a top-up.
Instead of saying: “Are you asking me to break the law for your cheap ass?”, Quek actually decided to help him.
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So, he downloaded a computer programme to acquire the file information of two cards and then used the details of one card with $50 to overwrite another with low value.
Quek didn’t use them to pay for his air-conditioner because it was faulty but soon discovered that he could modify Kopitiam cards in a similar way.
Stronger Defences
While this worked initially, he found that he couldn’t use them in 2016, because Kopitiam had started using cards with a strong encryption system.
But Quek was a determined criminal.
The former NTU student obtained a specialised card from Taobao to modify the unique identification numbers of the cards he had borrowed from his friends.
It worked.
Quek used the cards to pay for food, drinks, parking fees, and cigarettes.
But Then, He Got Greedy
In May 2017, Quek began selling the modified Kopitiam cards on Carousell. He coded each one so it had a stored value of S$100 and sold them for around S$55 to S$70 each.
They must have sold like bubble tea cups on the first day of Phase 2.
Quek met his customers at Kopitiams so they could check the value. When they asked him if the cards were legal, Quek said he got them through a friend’s company giveaway.
That should have set off alarm bells, but customers were probably too busy eating cheap Chendol to notice.
After selling 121 modified Kopitiam cards to 24 people, Quek was finally caught after a Kopitiam staff member at the Lau Pa Sat outlet noticed suspicious transactions made by one of his customers.
He was arrested on 25 July 2017 after the police tracked down several of his customers.
He has since made restitution of S$12,100 for the losses that Kopitiam suffered, reported TODAYonline.
Re-Applying to University
Quek, who withdrew from his course due to the “lengthy period of police investigations”, will return to court on 22 July for sentencing.
Quek’s lawyer, Mr Desmond Tan, said that the 29-year-old intends to re-apply to university once his case is concluded.
In April, a 25-year-old NTU graduate was jailed sentenced to 10 months’ jail for hacking Kopitiam cards as well.
Let’s hope that aspiring criminals will stick to robbing banks and leave our poor Kopitiam cards alone.
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