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In June 2006, CAD received numerous police reports filed by merchants, credit card holders and banks alleging that someone had used credit cards to make fraudulent purchases. The credit card accounts were used to incur several large purchases in Singapore. However, the victims who were the cardholders did not misplace their credit cards.
CAD probed into the case and identified that the affected credit card accounts had been maliciously compromised by a syndicate. Investigations soon identified the compromised point of purchase and the criminal profits.
Not long after, one of the syndicate members, Mak Weng Yew who was working as a waiter at the pub was nabbed and found with a hand-held skimmer in his possession. He was only part of the syndicate.
Within 48 hours, the syndicate was clamped down. Five other perpetrators comprising two undergrads and the masterminds, Chong Shih Wai and Jorim Foo, and three others namely 24-year-old Lee En Tien Eugene, 24-year-old Tang Soong See and 22-year-old Chan Chuan Kit Nathaneal were arrested for conspiracy to cheat.
Chong Shih Wai, 22, was an accomplished young entrepreneur and a top student at NUS. Jorim Foo, 21, was his army buddy.
Both of them had chanced upon a website that detailed how credit cards could be cloned using stolen data in order to make profits. Pooling their money, they went online and bought a skimmer, which can be used to capture credit card information. In order to clone the credit cards, they used a card-encoder to download the stolen credit card information and thereafter write it onto the black magnetic strip on the credit cards.
Using the sophisticated computer devices, Chong Shih Wai and Jorim Foo, started a racket purchasing high-end electronics and luxury items using cloned cards.
Between May and June 2006, the syndicate targeted shops that did not have security cameras and splurged on big ticket items such as a luxurious watch, laptops, PDAs and digital cameras.
As the purchases were getting larger, Chong Shih Wai recruited a friend Eugene to source for expired credit cards. In doing so, they could clone more credit cards and make more profit. Eugene bought six expired credit cards and handed them to Chong Shih Wai, who would then encode the information that Mak Weng Yew had captured at the pub onto the expired cards. Nathaneal, Mak Weng Yew and Tang Soong See then used these cards to make fraudulent purchases. The goods were handed to Chong Shih Wai and Jorim Foo, to be sold off.
On 27 October 2006, the six members of the syndicate were convicted and sentenced up to three years and nine months for their roles in the fraud. The two masterminds, Chong Shih Wai and Jorim Foo received the heaviest punishment.
Handing down the sentences, District Judge Liew Thiam Leng said that probation was not an appropriate punishment. The judge said: "To ensure that Singapore remains an attractive place for business, computer crimes must be treated as seriously as other serious offences. "He noted that the syndicate had stolen data from genuine credit-cardholders and transferred it to expired credit cards "with the objective of making fraudulent purchases".
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