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Man fined for cheating mobile service providers
By Jo-ann Huang | Posted: 21 April 2011 1934 hrs
SINGAPORE : A Chinese national, Shi Yonggang, was fined S$10,600 on Thursday for assisting another person to register more than 2,500 prepaid mobile phone SIM cards with copies of scanned passports from China.
On Tuesday, 33-year-old Shi had pleaded guilty to assisting Singapore citizen Han Yufei to cheat mobile service providers of registration incentives.
Han ran several businesses dealing with prepaid SIM cards and other telecommunication products and services.
He first contacted Shi, who was a high school classmate, in May 2009 about obtaining scanned Chinese passport copies.
Shi assisted Han to cheat SingTel from July 2009 to January 2010 by providing scanned passport copies through his contact "Dan Dan".
"Dan Dan" uploaded the scanned copies onto Shi's email account and Han subsequently downloaded and printed the passport copies from there.
Since 2005, all mobile service providers are required to capture and submit personal details of those registering prepaid SIM cards electronically through terminal devices provided by the mobile service providers.
This allows the retailer of each prepaid SIM card to be identified and is used by mobile service providers to compute retailers' registration incentives.
This was also part of a security review to boost Singapore's security.
By registering prepaid SIM cards with details from the scanned passports, Shi assisted Han in obtaining more than S$10,000 in registration incentives from Singtel.
Han and another accused Feng Min, a 31-year-old Chinese national and Singapore permanent resident, would sell the registered SIM cards through their retail shops or in bulk to other customers.
Shi, Han and Feng were arrested in January after an island-wide raid.
- CNA/ms
