On Dec 23, Long Junsheng, 40, was sentenced to four years and 11 months’ jail after he pleaded guilty to multiple cheating charges. - ST
SINGAPORE: A con man used different schemes to cheat 37 victims of more than S$1.4 million in total from July 2018 to October 2023.
On Dec 23, Long Junsheng, 40, was sentenced to four years and 11 months’ jail after he pleaded guilty to multiple cheating charges.
Court documents state that from 2017 to 2023, he worked as a salesman at a company called J-Workz Office Solutions, which dealt with office products.
Deputy public prosecutors Darren Sim and Nicole Tay said that in 2018, Long began promoting accounting software to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on J-Workz’s behalf to earn commissions.
He would lie, claiming that the software and its associated costs would be covered by a government-linked initiative – Enterprise Singapore’s Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG).
The initiative is aimed at helping Singapore companies improve their productivity through IT solutions, and Long claimed he would help the victims to apply for such grants.
Long made company directors sign a form and make payment, promising that once the administrative processes were completed, the firms would be reimbursed accordingly.
The document was a 60-month leasing agreement with GC Lease Singapore, a leasing company, of which J-Workz was a client.
The DPPs said: “The company directors would have to endorse a delivery order which confirmed that they had received the software from J-Workz, although this was false.
“The company directors were told that the processing of the software purchase and/or the application of government grants could take place only after the said documents were signed.”
Long would then take these documents to GC Lease.
Believing that the affected companies had received the products, GC Lease disbursed the agreed-upon sums to J-Workz.
GC Lease would also continue to collect money from the affected companies on a monthly basis, the court heard.
J-Workz would pay Long the entire disbursed sum as his commission.
In a bid to avoid any suspicions, Long paid the victims some money out of his commission, claiming this was the first round of “government reimbursement”.
After that, he would stop contacting the victims, said the DPPs.
The ruse involved 13 victims, who suffered losses totalling nearly $425,000.
Separately, the court heard that Long lost about $1.3 million in local casinos between February 2022 and August 2023.
He took over an IT solutions company called The IT Crew in or before 2023.
The DPPs said Long started using payments received from the company’s customers to fund his gambling habit.
Between February and October 2023, he would introduce himself as a representative of The IT Crew to the victims, who ran SMEs.
He told the victims that he would provide them with IT solutions in exchange for payments.
Among other things, he told the victims that if they paid him up front, he would help them obtain the PSG, which could be used to “offset their payment” for his services.
However, Long had no intention of delivering the promised IT solutions to the victims.
Instead, he used the payments from them on gambling and other personal expenses.
He also used a portion of his ill-gotten gains to provide refunds to some of his customers.
By using this ruse, he cheated 23 victims, who suffered losses totalling more than $1 million.
In an unrelated case, Long also cheated a 29-year-old Malaysian woman of more than $40,000.
She was a live-streamer on TikTok, and Long purchased large quantities of electronic gifts for her on the social media platform.
They eventually entered a romantic relationship.
In September 2023, he told the woman that he had to go to Los Angeles for a so-called work trip and asked her to accompany him.
He claimed he had engaged an agent from Malaysia to apply for the necessary visas.
He asked the woman to make various payments from her Malaysia bank account to the “agent”.
The DPPs said: “Acting on the accused’s instructions, and believing that these payments were to an agent, (the woman) made... fund transfers from her bank account to various bank accounts, the details of which were provided by the accused.”
On 11 occasions between Sept 17 and Oct 19, 2023, Long duped the woman into performing fund transfers involving more than $40,000 in total.
She eventually found out that he had not applied for any visas.
In reality, she had made the fund transfers to bank accounts belonging to various money changers.
The DPPs said Long had liaised with the money changers to collect the funds, which he used on his personal expenses.
He also used some of the money to buy electronic gifts for live hosts on TikTok.
Long was arrested on Oct 24, 2023, and had been in remand since then.
His lawyers, Tan Jun Yin and Sugenya Manogaran, from Trident Law Corporation, sought a sentence of four years and 11 months’ jail, stressing that he accepts full responsibility for his actions.
For the case involving The IT Crew, Manogaran said Long had no initial intention to cheat, and that the commission of offences arose from a progressive deterioration of his personal and financial circumstances.
This distinguishes him from the other offenders who had set out to deceive from the outset, the court heard.
As for the case involving the woman, Manogaran acknowledged that Long had abused the emotional trust in the context of a romantic relationship.
However, the defence added that it must be “properly contextualised”, given that it was not equivalent in degree to a fiduciary breach by an employee or corporate abuse of position as seen in other cheating cases. - The Straits Times/ANN
