Twenty Chinese nationals managed to enter Singapore using sham visas produced by a China-based syndicate, and one Singaporean man was responsible for making it all possible.
39-year-old James Sim Guan Liang managed to figure out his way 293 SingPass accounts and sold the personal of the account holders to the syndicate for copious amounts of money.
He has since pleaded guilty in court to 73 charges under the Computer Misuse and Cybersecurity Act, TODAY reports.
Sim had gotten into the identity-trafficking game since 2006, when he started selling his NRIC in exchange for $100 for illegal means. A Chinese national — only known by the moniker of “Lemon” — would use his NRIC to sponsor visa applications for Chinese nationals who wanted to come to Singapore.
After two years of exchanging his NRIC for cash, Sim’s IC number eventually got rejected and could no longer be used to make visa applications. Undeterred, he started experimenting with random NRIC numbers to figure out the legit ones, and managed to log into their various SingPass accounts. He logged in successfully for the accounts that use their IC numbers as their passwords.
Harvesting a total of 293 unique SingPass login credentials, he would retrieve the account-holder’s personal particulars and other information required for visa applications. For each batch of personal details e-mailed to Lemon, he would receive $300.
123 of the credentials were used by the syndicate to sponsor sham applications — of which 23 visa applications were successful. Out of the 20 Chinese nationals who managed to enter Singapore with fake applications, three of them have committed criminal offences here. They’ve since been repatriated.
It was only in 2010 when Sim’s offences came to light — the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority detected a number of suspicious visa applications involving a common credit card. The applications were also traced to Zhejiang, China — even though none of the sponsors travelled there.
Sim’s next hearing has been fixed for Feb 26.
