Man jailed for giving bribes to get confidential details of StarHub, Singtel customers who owed him money

SINGAPORE — In a bid to recover money that people purportedly owed him, Philbert Lim Zong Xian bribed another man with S$1,000 to obtain their confidential details from the subscriber databases of StarHub and Singtel.

On Wednesday (April 20), Lim was sentenced to four weeks’ jail after pleading guilty to two counts of giving corrupt gratification to Lee Cheng Yan.

Another similar charge was taken into consideration for sentencing.

Lee, now 38, had made headlines again earlier this year when he was given a second lifetime driving ban. He had gotten back behind the wheel while already banned for life for dragging a traffic police officer for more than 100m with his Maserati car in 2017.

Lee was also jailed for taking bribes to procure the telco customers' details.

For the telco case, the court heard how it was Lee who told Lim that he knew people who could find out the addresses of phone line subscribers by using their phone numbers.

Lee and Lim were acquainted with each other, though court documents did not state how they met.

Lee also said he could help to retrieve addresses at a rate of S$350 per number, and that he needed to pay his contacts for finding these addresses.

Between January and April 2017, Lim provided three phone numbers to Lee and paid him a total of S$1,000.

Lee gave one number to Kelvin Foo Cheek Ann, who was working as a retail consultant at a store run by Singtel. Foo had access to a Singtel system that allowed staff to access existing customers’ details for work purposes.

Lee had approached Foo in 2015 to ask for help in retrieving customers’ details, and offered him S$20 for each number he checked.

Foo checked the number that Lim had provided, retrieved the subscriber’s address, and passed it to Lee who gave it to Lim, the court heard.

Lim then transferred S$350 into Lee's bank account.

Foo, now 32, was jailed 18 weeks last year after he pleaded guilty to corruption and unauthorised access to Singtel's system.

A fourth man, Zhang Jiazheng, was jailed 10 weeks last year. He worked for StarHub as a customer care consultant at the time and had illegally retrieved customers’ details for Lee, who was his secondary school friend.

Those convicted of giving bribes can be jailed for up to five years or fined up to S$100,000, or punished with both.