SINGAPORE — A member of an online gambling syndicate who did not have a proper job made arrangements with a company to falsely declare him as an employee and pay into his Central Provident Fund account so that he could get a housing loan to buy an HDB flat.
Defendant Kiegan Tan Ming Ren, 32, pleaded guilty to five charges under the Remote Gambling Act and Corruption, Drug Trafficking and Other Serious Crimes Act. He was sentenced to 17 months in prison and fined $60,000. The judge also considered the other eight charges when sentencing. The defendant was a member of an online gambling syndicate who collected bets and received commissions and dividends. To prove that he was employed and had a stable income to apply for a housing loan, between Aug 2016 and Nov 2017, he paid $6,600 to Lim Poh Kian, a shareholder of a company, to falsely declare the defendant as an employee and pay into his Central Provident Fund account.
Between March 2018 and June 2019, the defendant made the same arrangement with another man and paid the other party more than $17,000 to pay into his CPF account. Tan was arrested at Waterway Point in July 2019 as part of an island-wide operation by the police to nab 36 people in the illegal gambling syndicate.