Man pleads guilty to running online prostitution site

SINGAPORE — He grew up in a low-income family and was toiling as a hawker stall assistant to make ends meet when he thought up an idea to make easy money: Selling advertising space on websites to prostitutes.

Within eight months of starting his first such site, Chen Guoguang managed to corral 110 women touting sexual services into his stable.

His business grew so big that it started “gaining too much attention” from the authorities, so the 30-year-old Singaporean started another site to escape the heat.

Despite his best-laid plans, he was nabbed by the police one month later.

Today (May 22), Chen was sentenced to 18 weeks’ jail for living on the earnings of prostitution. In total, his illicit earnings amounted to S$134,550 in only one year of running the prostitution websites.

The court heard that Chen pounced on the business idea because it did not require much capital, and was “easy”, given he was proficient in information technology from playing computer games in cybercafes when he was younger.

He started scouring other prostitution websites for the women’s contact details and would try to poach them via short message service (SMS) or mobile chat app WeChat.

When his site was up and running in March last year, Chen asked for S$10 in commission for each deal done through his website. Business was so brisk that he upped it to a flat rate of S$200 a month, and then S$400 a month.

Chen even hired two assistants seven months into his operations to help him solicit prostitutes and collect payments from the women.

By February this year, his booming business started to draw attention from the authorities and Chen decided to start another site offering the same services.

But he was arrested the following month, after the police acted on a tip-off that Chen was behind the sites. He was arrested at Block 11, York Hill, where the police seized items such as a computer and 60 prepaid SIM cards that he used to carry out his prostitution site business.

Today, Chen, who did not have a lawyer, had brief words for his mitigation plea. “I would like to plead for leniency. I come from a poor family. I will never do this again; I am a first-time offender.”

Nine charges were pressed against him. Four were proceeded on, with the remaining taken into consideration for the purposes of sentencing.

During sentencing, District Judge Mathew Joseph said he found Chen’s IT skills “quite remarkable”, but added that his decision to use them to commit the offences was a “regrettable and pitiful display of the lack of wisdom”.

The judge also said Chen’s transgression was not a mild one, considering the sophisticated nature of his online operations.

He urged Chen to look for a job in the IT sector upon completing his sentence, where he could put his skills to proper use.

For each charge, Chen could have been jailed for up to five years and fined up to S$10,000. His 18 weeks’ jail sentence was backdated to March 13, when he was first remanded.