Out of jail 2 months, serial sex offender coerced underage girls into sex acts by pretending to be gang member

SINGAPORE — Just two months after completing a jail term for sexually abusing five young girls, Simon Wong Choy Chuan used similar methods to force another four teenagers to perform sex acts on him.

He lied that he headed the “Omega” secret society, knowing that they would not dare to report him to the police, and claimed to have clairvoyant abilities.

In one instance, he told a 14-year-old girl that ill fortune would befall her if she did not fulfil his demands. He also came up with a weekly roster for the victims to satisfy his needs.

Wong, 32, a former Singapore permanent resident, pleaded guilty on Monday (Feb 24) to four counts of sexual penetration of a minor. Another 24 similar charges will be taken into consideration for sentencing next month.

The Immigration and Checkpoints Authority said on Wednesday that his permanent resident status was revoked in 2018, after the authorities reviewed his case upon his earlier release from prison.

It was Wong’s third conviction for underage sex offences, the court heard. In 2007, when he was 19 years old, he was sentenced to one year of probation for having consensual sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend.

In 2013, he was jailed for six-and-a-half years and given six strokes of the cane for lying to five girls that he was possessed by multiple spirits, then threatening them in order to force them to perform multiple sex acts on him.

Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Chee Ee Ling told the court that the victims gave in “out of fear of reprisal”, and Wong went back to his old ways just two months after being released. 

Wong also has a “high risk of sexual offending towards young teenage girls in the same group”, based on an assessment by the Institute of Mental Health.

On Monday, District Judge Christopher Goh called for a report to assess if he is suitable for corrective training — a harsher form of imprisonment where the offender is unlikely to be given early release for factors such as good behaviour.

Wong’s lawyer told the court that he had asked for a regular imprisonment term and not to revoke his permanent resident status, but the judge said that he would impose a longer sentence after taking Wong’s criminal history into account.

It was not up to him to revoke Wong’s permanent resident status, the judge added.

COLLECTED S$130 IN ‘GANG MEMBERSHIP FEES’

The court heard that Wong committed his latest offences from September 2017 to February 2018. He was aged 30 then and worked part-time at his mother’s employment agency that handled foreign domestic workers.

After meeting a 15-year-old girl on Facebook through a mutual friend, Wong told her to introduce him to more female friends. He also lied that he was only 21 years old and sexually exploited her when they began dating.

The girl introduced her best friend — also aged 15 — to him, along with two other girls aged 13 and 14.

Wong lied to the other three girls that he was only 19 years old. He told them that he was the head of the Omega gang, asking them to join it and to pay him S$10 in membership fees every day.

In return, he promised to protect them from being bullied in school. He ended up collecting S$130 from them.

When he told the first victim to teach her friends how to perform sex acts, she complied after some reluctance. She did not want to risk angering him because he was her boyfriend and the gang’s second-in-command, DPP Chee told the court.

To persuade the other three girls into submitting to his demands, Wong claimed to have clairvoyant abilities. He also asked two of them to be his girlfriends, despite being in a “relationship” with the first victim.

He sexually abused them at locations such as the staircase landing of a multi-storey car park in Teck Whye in Chua Chu Kang housing estate.

On one occasion, in January 2018, he gathered them for a “gang meeting” at the multi-storey car park at Block 351 Canberra Road in Sembawang.

As he was playing a popular mobile phone game with the 13-year-old girl, he suddenly told her that she should do “the thing” for him later — which the teen understood to mean performing a sexual act.

On Wong’s instructions, the first victim began teaching the younger girl how to perform oral sex on him.

After this, the 13-year-old stopped going for the meetings and did not talk to Wong anymore. She filed a police report on Feb 14, 2018 because he kept calling her and asking her to attend the meetings.

The victims were later taken to the Child Guidance Clinic, where they were found to have an extremely low or below-average range of intelligence.

One of them failed nearly all of her subjects in 2018, became emotionally distressed and had suicidal thoughts. She blamed herself for what had happened, saying that she was “very dumb”, and realised the acts were wrong only after she went for sex education in school.