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On 30 Jan 2002, almost 1,000 foreign workers of PRC nationality descended on the Police Cantonment Complex to complain against Lam Chen Fong, the proprietor of Wen Long Money Changer. They handed their hard-earned money to Lam to be remitted to their families. But Lam had misappropriated their money and had absconded. Emotions were indeed very high.
Lam Chen Fong was reported to have misappropriated remittance money belonging to his PRC clients. He surrendered to the police on 29 Jan 2002. Two core investigation teams were formed; one to investigate into the predicate offence of criminal breach of trust and the other team to trace and recover the stolen money using financial investigation techniques.
Given the numerous victims, special attention was given to the recovery of the stolen money. Over the next 2½ months, the 2 teams of investigators covered a lot of ground and ploughed through piles of documentation and records to make out a case against Lam and to recover the stolen proceeds.
Although Lam surrendered to the police, it was difficult for the Financial Investigation Team to determine the manner he used the client's money and it was even more difficult to recover the stolen proceeds. Lam who was a compulsive gambler had incurred heavy gambling debts in May 2001, which he could not pay. In desperation, Lam used the clients' money to settle the debts. It was also established through investigation that in June 2001, Lam hatched a scheme to cover-up his misdeeds. Lam started to offer high exchange rate for Renminbi currency to entice more PRC clients to engage his services, with condition that their beneficiaries would only receive the money in one month. The exchange rate offered by Lam was much higher than any other remittance houses in Singapore. Normally, such remittances would be sent to the beneficiaries within a few days, but Lam needed the one-month grace period so that he could use clients' money for his own purposes.
Lam's scheme worked for the next few months but it was a bubble waiting to burst. During weekends, Lam could collect a few hundred thousands. However, Lam's luck at gambling did not change and he continued to dip his hands into clients' money to settle his gambling debts. Offering very favourable foreign exchange rates to his clients, however, was not commercially viable - it was a loss making operation, made worse by his gambling excesses. To keep up the pretense, he continued to make remittances of those amounts reaching the end of the one-month grace period. In so doing, Lam was able to hide his misdeeds and his scheme was not detected for months. But the bubble burst when he ran out of money and started to default on making the remittances on time. His clients started to lodge complaints against him.
It was subsequently established that Lam had misappropriated about $8.77 million from 1,153 victims. The Financial Investigation Team was persistent in their pursuit for hidden monies. A sum of $905,398.93 or about 10.3% of the stolen monies were seized.
In passing sentence, the learned judge said that "whether his case will be regarded as the 'swindle of the (new) century' remains to be seen but I do not think any arguments for the maximum sentence here would be too compelling". He also added that, "the accused had done a great disservice to our country."
On 19 Jul 2002, Lam was sentenced to 22 years' imprisonment at the High Court.
The conclusion of the court case did not spell the end of the work for the investigators. They then focused their attention on returning the recovered money to the victims. CAD verified and processed the claims of over 1,000 victims. CAD worked with the Insolvency and Public Trustee's Office to distribute the recovered money to the victims some of whom had returned to China before the recovered money could be processed.
However, through the hard work of the investigators and the combined efforts of the other agencies, CAD has mitigated the disservice by ensuring that the victims got back some of their lost monies.
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