Man used telco employees to obtain addresses of debtors
A man who needed the addresses of various people from whom he wanted to recover money purportedly owed by them engaged in a scheme to enlist telco employees for help.
Philbert Lim Zong Xian, 35, was sentenced to four weeks' jail in court on Wednesday (April 20) after he pleaded guilty to two corruption charges.
The Singaporean's accomplice, Lee Cheng Yan, was given the same sentence for the offence on Jan 27 this year. Lee's sentence was part of an overall jail sentence of one year, nine months and 16 weeks for various offences.
Lee, then 38, was sentenced while serving his earlier sentence of four years and seven months' jail for offences including driving a Maserati that had dragged a policeman for more than 100m in 2017.
On Wednesday, Deputy Public Prosecutor Magdalene Huang told the court Lee had told Lim sometime in 2017 that he had contacts who could find out the addresses of phone line subscribers by using their phone numbers.
He added that Lim needed to pay his contacts $350 per number for helping to retrieve the addresses. Lim was aware that Lee would need to have contacts from telcos such as Singtel, StarHub or M1 to procure the subscribers' addresses.
"He was also aware that it was wrong for Lee's contacts to procure the subscribers' addresses for him, and for him to pay Lee to get them to do so for him." said DPP Huang.
Sometime in January 2017, Lim paid Lee $350 and gave him a phone number for his contacts to trace the subscriber's address.
Lee passed the number to Kelvin Foo Cheek Ann, a retail consultant at the Singtel shop in Parkway Parade.
Foo was employed by Telecom Equipment, a wholly owned subsidiary of Singtel. His job scope included selling mobile and broadband plans, which gave him access to existing customer's details in Singtel's "Icon" system.
When Lee approached Foo in 2015 for help in retrieving customer details, Foo had accepted Lee's offer of paying him $20 for each number.
Using the phone number provided by Lim, Foo retrieved the subscriber's address and gave it to Lee, who then passed the address to Lim on Feb 9, 2017.
On or about April 30, 2017, Lim paid Lee another $350 to obtain the address of another person.
In her written sentencing submissions, DPP Huang said Lim and Lee had equal culpability in committing the offences.
Lim could have been jailed for up to five years and fined up to $100,000 for each count of corruption.
Foo, then 32, was sentenced to 18 weeks' jail in January last year.
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