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Clerk who forged cheques with erasable ink pen gets 50 months’ jail

SINGAPORE — Armed with an erasable ink pen, an administrative clerk of a Japanese multinational company altered 14 cheques over more than nine months, and pocketed more than half a million dollars.

SINGAPORE — Armed with an erasable ink pen, an administrative clerk of a Japanese multinational company altered 14 cheques over more than nine months, and pocketed more than half a million dollars.

On Wednesday (Jan 31), Seah Yuh Lih, 46, pleaded guilty to altering the ‘payee’ and ‘amount’ fields of cheques issued by her company with a black Pilot Frixion erasable ink pen. She was sentenced to 50 months’ jail.

Part of Seah’s role as an admin clerk at Toyo Engineering Corporation’s Singapore branch office included preparing cheques to pay the company’s suppliers.

She would fill in cheques with details of genuine invoices, before getting the Singapore branch business manager, Mr Shiraishi Mikihiko, to sign them. Then, she erased the names of the payee and replaced them with her own. She also altered the amounts to be paid.

She did this 14 times, between July 15, 2015 and March 18, 2016, and obtained a total of S$504,737.42. Of the sum she misappropriated, S$222,103 was used to exchange for casino chips at Marina Bay Sands.

Seah made no restitution of the money.

Her crime came to light after an accountant in company’s main office in Japan discovered some discrepancies between the company’s bank account balance at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and the account statements submitted by Seah.

Following an investigation, Mr Mikihiko discovered that Seah was the payee of 14 cheques paid out of that bank account.

She was arrested after Mr Mikihiko lodged a police report on May 7, 2016.

The police seized two of the erasable-ink pens in her possession in the course of investigations.

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