Singapore: In order to earn cash, a man dialed the number left on the toilet door and became one of the people involved in a loan scam that defrauded DBS Bank to pay S$1.89 million.
Muhammad Fazly Laily, 28, was sentenced to six months in prison for participating in a scam on Thursday (October 28). He pleaded guilty to one count of obtaining property in his bank account, which amounted to fraudulent criminal proceeds.
The court was informed that Fazly was a freelance video technician at the time of the case and earned 600 to 700 SGD between March 2019 and April 2019.
Sometime in late March 2019, he went to a coffee shop near the Aljunied MRT station and then went to the toilet. On the back of one of the doors is a handwritten message that says “Cash is needed, please call this number”.
Fazli didn’t know who wrote it, or who owned the phone number engraved on the door, but he still dialed the number.
An unidentified man answered the phone, and Fazli asked him if he could get any amount of cash as a loan. When the man answered “yes”, Fazli asked if the loan was legal and asked where the man worked.
An unknown person told Fazli that if the loan was illegal, he would not be able to obtain a loan from the bank.
Fazli just wanted to take the money, so he didn’t check the person’s name, work unit information, and how this person helped him get the bank loan.
Fazly told the man on the phone that he wanted to apply for a bank loan of S$5,000 to S$10,000. He thought his salary was too low to qualify for a loan, but decided to try his luck.
The man on the other end of the phone asked Fazly for his ID photo, as well as his POSB ATM PIN code, credit bureau report, POSB account number, and SingPass login ID and password. Fazly gave him the information, and this person told Fazly that it would take one to two weeks to apply.
Fazly claimed that he lost the phone he used to call that person, and because he did not remember the number, he stopped calling him.
On April 11, 2019, Fazly checked his POSB savings account and found that he had received a loan of S$11,400 from DBS Bank as part of the DBS Cashline loan.
He realized that the loan amount was higher than what he had requested from an unknown person, and believed that the bank could not grant him this amount as a loan because his low monthly salary would make him ineligible.
He took out all the money and spent it on himself for food, massage, and sexual services.
DBS LODGES police report
In May 2019, a DBS bank fraud officer submitted a report to the police stating that there were more than 150 DBS Cashline loan applications submitted in the name of different people, with false pay slips and income documents.
Between March 2019 and May 2019, DBS Bank was defrauded to pay S$1.89 million for these fraudulent Cashline loan applications. One of the applications was submitted in the name of Fazly, and the Department of Commercial Affairs began investigating these crimes.
The investigation revealed that the DBS Bank Cashline loan application was submitted in the name of Fazly on April 8, 2019, with false pay slips.
The forged documents claim that Fazly earned a salary of S$4,660.50 from a company called Presico Engineering, and DBS Bank was tricked into paying a loan of S$11,400 to Fazly’s bank account.
Fazly did not voluntarily repay the loan. Approximately S$300 was recovered from his POSB account, but the remaining approximately S$11,000 has not yet been settled.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Stacey Anne Fernandez asked for six months in jail and pointed out that Fazly “personally enriched itself” with the full amount paid.
She said that he spent all the money in a short period of time-the loan was issued on April 11, 2019, and he was arrested on April 23, 2019.
Fazli is currently serving a sentence for drug crimes and asked whether his new sentence can be executed at the same time as the current sentence. The judge told him this was wrong because the verdict was for different crimes.
When his current term ends, he will begin his six months in prison.
