A S’porean Scammed An Overseas Company of Nearly $1 million By Pretending Supply PPEs

I don’t know about you but that’s a big amount of money for one person to scam from a company.

Just today (28 May 2020), a 35-year-old Singaporean man was charged in court for cheating an overseas distribution company off of S$915,000. The suspect had pretended to be a supplier of N95 masks and personal protection gowns.

Now, how did he do that?

Tricks Unsuspecting Man into Transferring Money 

The suspect, 35-year-old, Chee Jian Rong was charged with a count for cheating a man – whom the court documents identified as Anthony Bonacci.

The accused was said to have tricked his victim into transferring an amount of US$251,250 into a bank account.

Chee claimed that the money was a deposit for 150,000 units of personal protection gowns. The purchase price of the gowns totalled up to US$502,000.

That’s S$713,041! That’s a lot of upsized McDonalds meals!

According to TODAYonline, Mr Chee was arrested by the police on 26 May. This was after the company failed to receive the products they were promised on 30 April.

It’s unknown when the remaining amount, which comes out to a totality of US$646,000 (~S$915,000) ,was transferred to him.

The police confiscated two watches and more S$81,000 in cash from the suspect upon his arrest.

Money Was Put in Several Bank Accounts

Preliminary investigations found that Mr Chee had deposited the payment he received from Mr Bonacci into several bank accounts in Singapore and overseas.

In statement, the police said: “Through quick intervention and close collaboration with the three local banks, namely DBS, OCBC and UOB, the police’s Anti-Scam Centre managed to recover more than S$370,000 of the amount scammed. Efforts are underway to trace and recover the remaining monies.”

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Mr Chee Jian Rong has been remanded for a week at The Central Police Division headquarters. He is scheduled to return to court on 4 June.

If convicted of cheating the alleged could face a sentence of up to 10 years of jail time.

The official news statement also continued on to say that Mr Chee will be facing money-laundering charges. These charges carry a maximum fine of S$500,000 and jail sentence of up to 10 years.

I don’t know whether to say that Mr Chee is a professional scammer or Mr Bonacci should have known better.

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