SINGAPORE — The director of a telecommunications retailer was on Monday (June 6) sentenced to 24 months’ jail for conspiring with his employees to fraudulently register 707 prepaid SIM cards, in a bid to help his firm qualify for incentives from the telcos here.

Wong Yat Sung, 44, had pleaded guilty to 235 charges of unauthorised modification of computer material under the Computer Misuse and Cybersecurity Act, while the remaining 472 charges were taken into consideration during sentencing.

In May 2013, Wong told his employee that his firm, Gadget 3, at People’s Park Centre could qualify for incentives if it met certain sales targets set by Singtel.

He then instructed the employee to falsely register prepaid cards using the passports or other identification documents of foreigners who bought these cards from the store.

Each time a customer buys a card from his shop, the employee would use the customer’s passport image to register more prepaid SIM cards — between one and eight cards each time — without their knowledge.

The court heard that Wong told his employees that Singtel would offer an incentive of S$2.50 for each prepaid SIM card sold, while StarHub would pay S$2. Both telcos also offered bonus incentives for retailers who hit a certain sales quota.

In the following month, Wong instructed the same employee to adopt the same method of fraudulently registering the prepaid SIM cards for the cards under StarHub as well, so as to meet the telco’s sales target and get the incentives.

Wong also told his employee to sell the pre-registered prepaid cards to people operating handphone shops in Pearl Centre.

In all, 707 prepaid cards were falsely registered by Gadget 3 between July 23 and Oct 6 that year, under the names of 141 subscribers of foreign nationalities.

Apart from making profits through the card sales, Wong retained the incentives made by his firm, including a trip to Las Vegas.

His employee Wong Kok Leong, 41, was earlier sentenced to 18 months’ jail for similar offences.

Calling for a total sentence of 24 months, Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Sanjiv Vaswani said Wong’s actions had undermined the system of regulatory controls intended to ensure the security of the prepaid SIM card regime.

The authorities had, in 2014, reduced the number of prepaid SIM cards per subscriber from 10 to three to make it more onerous for errant dealers to sell these cards that could potentially be used for illegal activities.

The DPP also noted that Wong had “increased culpability” when compared to his employee Wong Kok Leong. For instance, his employee had acted on the director’s instructions and retained “a mere 20 per cent” of the commission earned.

Wong could have been jailed up to three years and/or fined S$10,000 for each of his charges.