Huang Ying-Chun v Public Prosecutor

• Jurisdiction: Singapore
• Judge: See Kee Oon J
• Judgment Date: 06 December 2018
• Neutral Citation: [2018] SGHC 269
• Year: 2018
• Date: 06 December 2018
• Published date: 27 December 2018
• Hearing Date: 19 October 2018
• Subject Matter: Appeals,Criminal Procedure and Sentencing,Benchmark Sentences,Sentencing
• Plaintiff Counsel: Koh Weijin, Leon (Xu Weijin) (N S Kang)
• Defendant Counsel: Loh Hui-min, Leong Wing Tuck and Tan Ben Mathias (Attorney-General's Chambers)
• Court: High Court (Singapore)
• Citation: [2018] SGHC 269
• Docket Number: Magistrate’s Appeal No 9184 of 2018

See Kee Oon J: Introduction

The appellant, Huang Ying-Chun, is a Taiwanese national who was 52-years-old at the material time. He pleaded guilty to one charge under s 44(1)(a) of the Corruption, Drug Trafficking and Other Serious Crimes (Confiscation of Benefits) Act (Cap 65A, 2000 Rev Ed) (“CDSA”). In essence, the appellant was involved as a runner for a foreign syndicate that cheated Singapore residents of their monies and laundered those monies out of Singapore. The syndicate operated what might colloquially be known as a “police impersonation scam”.

The material part of the charge is as follows:

You ... are charged that you, between 22nd June 2017 to 6th July 2017, in Singapore, were concerned in an arrangement, having reasonable grounds to believe that by the arrangement, the control of an unknown person’s benefits of criminal conduct was facilitated and having reasonable grounds to believe that the said unknown person was engaged in criminal conduct, to wit, you collected and handed over of cash monies amounting to a total of about SGD$957,000 (Nine Hundred and Fifty Seven Thousand Dollars), which was the said unknown person’s benefits from criminal conduct, and you have therefore committed an offence under section 44(1)(a) of the Corruption, Drug Trafficking and Other Serious Crimes (Confiscation of Benefits) Act, (Cap. 65A, 2000 Rev Ed) and punishable under section 44(5)(a) of the same Act.

The District Judge sentenced the appellant to six years and six months’ imprisonment. Magistrate’s Appeal No 9184 of 2018 is the appellant’s appeal against sentence.

At the hearing of the appeal, both the appellant and the prosecution invited this court to set out a sentencing framework for s 44(1)(a) CDSA offences involving the laundering of cash proceeds of offences committed in Singapore. It was submitted by both parties that the existing sentencing precedents vary widely, and it was also pointed out that the question of a sentencing benchmark or framework had not previously been considered by the High Court. The parties were also largely agreed on the general schema of the framework to be adopted. Having reviewed the parties’ submissions, and examined the existing case law, I accept that this is an appropriate occasion to propose a framework to guide sentencing for s 44(1)(a) CDSA offences concerning cash laundering.

The material facts

The Statement of Facts which the appellant pleaded guilty to without qualification is set out in full in the District Judge’s Grounds of Decision in Public Prosecutor v Huang Ying-Chun [2018] SGDC 182 (the “GD”). I therefore set out only the essential facts in this appeal.

The appellant was involved in a police impersonation scam. It is helpful first to set out how these scams work. The scam in this case comprised four main steps, and involved three sets of people.

The first set of people are the victims. Unknown persons impersonating the Singapore Police or Interpol called six victims and cheated them into revealing their bank account login credentials. These unknown persons then used these credentials to access the victims’ bank accounts and transfer monies to certain other bank accounts. The victims ranged from 50 years of age to 82 years of age. This comprised the first step of the scam.

The victims’ monies were transferred to bank accounts belonging to the second set of people. These persons were not members of the syndicate, but instead had also been duped by persons impersonating the police into releasing their bank account details to persons acting on behalf of the syndicate, thus allowing monies to be transferred to their accounts by the victims. They may colloquially be known as “victim-mules”. There were five victim-mules in this case, whose ages ranged from 28 years of age to 61 years of age. The victim-mules received the victims’ monies in their bank accounts and held on to the monies until they received further instructions. This comprised the second step of the scam.

At the third step of the scam, the victim-mules were instructed by unknown individuals claiming to be from the police to withdraw cash from their bank accounts corresponding to the amount of money transferred into their bank account by the victims, and pass the cash to runners acting for the syndicate behind the scam. The victim-mules were not made to withdraw their own monies. To be clear, the runners would physically meet the victim-mules to collect the cash; no monies were wired between bank accounts. The third set of people, the runners, therefore came into the picture at this third step.

At the fourth step of the scam, the runners who met with the victim-mules would pass the cash on to other runners who would carry the monies out of Singapore, presumably back to the syndicate in Taiwan.

I now flesh out the details of the appellant’s involvement in this scam. Sometime in June 2017, in Taiwan, the appellant was approached by an unknown person to work for him. The job offered was for the appellant to go to Singapore and collect and hand over “documents”. He would be paid NT$60,000, or approximately S$2,700, for this job. No time period for the job is specified in the Statement of Facts.

The appellant accepted this job offer, and came to Singapore on 21 June 2017. He arrived with a co-accused, one Chen Peng-Yu (“Peng-Yu”), also a male Taiwanese national. Other persons involved with the syndicate, besides the appellant and Peng-Yu, included Li Li, Hsieh Teng-Chia, and Long Say Piaw.

The appellant carried out his first collection of “documents” on 22 June 2017. The appellant was instructed by Peng-Yu to collect “documents” from one victim-mule, who had had S$50,000 deposited into her account by one of the victims. The appellant met the victim-mule and collected that S$50,000. From this first collection of “documents”, the appellant realised the documents were actually monies. The appellant then passed the monies to another co-accused, Li Li. I shall refer to this sequence of events as the “first incident”.

The appellant was involved in 12 other such incidents which generally mirrored the sequence of events in the first incident. The amounts of money, the identities of the victim-mules, and the identities of the other runners the appellant interacted with differed, but the general modus operandi employed in each incident was the same. The appellant was therefore always the runner who came into the picture at the third step in the general scheme of the scam I described above at [7] to [10].

The appellant was involved in a total of 13 incidents over approximately two weeks. The first incident took place on 22 June 2017, and the last, on 6 July 2017. It suffices to note at this point that the total amount of money that passed through the appellant’s hands was S$957,000. The amounts the victims were individually cheated of ranged between S$10,000 in the case of a 72-year-old female Chinese national, and S$650,000 in the case of an 82-year-old male Singapore citizen. Only S$1,050 was ultimately recovered by the police.

Decision below

The District Judge considered that given the nature and gravity of the offence committed, the main sentencing consideration would be deterrence. He noted that the victims had been tricked into providing their login credentials to unknown individuals who then accessed the victims’ bank accounts to transfer the monies to the victim-mules. This undermined the confidence and integrity of Singapore’s banking system. The scam also tarnished the image of the police. General deterrence was therefore warranted.

The District Judge considered that there were several aggravating factors involved. First, there had been considerable planning and coordination in perpetuating the scam. Second, the syndicate had deliberately targeted the elderly, who were more vulnerable. Third, a transnational syndicate had been involved, which made investigation of the scam cases more difficult. Fourth, statistics showed that police impersonation scams were on the rise, which made general deterrence all the more pressing.

The District Judge also found some mitigating factors. Credit was given to the appellant for his plea of guilt, his remorsefulness, and his lack of antecedents in Singapore.

The District Judge considered several sentencing precedents and determined that the most relevant precedent was the unreported case of Public Prosecutor v Wang Wei-Ming (District Arrest Case No 927446 of 2017) (“Wang Wei-Ming”). As there were no grounds of decision given in that case, the District Judge noted that it was of limited usefulness as a precedent. In any event, analogising to that case, the District Judge determined that this case was much more serious because the amount cheated, the number of victims, and the number of occasions where the appellant interacted with the victim-mules were all higher. The offender in Wang Wei-Ming was sentenced to 42 months’ imprisonment. This case, being more serious, warranted a sentence of six and a half years.

Parties’ cases in this appeal The appellant’s case

The appellant appealed against the sentence of six years and six months’ imprisonment on the grounds that it was manifestly excessive. The appellant’s submissions can broadly be summarised as follows: The District Judge erred in giving undue weight to the sentencing principle of deterrence. Specific deterrence does not apply to the appellant, who in all likelihood will be deported from Singapore and not be permitted re-entry for having committed crimes here. Moreover, general deterrence would be ineffective in a case such as this. Runners or ‘money mules’ like the appellant are often the less-educated, rural poor. They have limited awareness of scams. Further, runners have only very loose ties to the upper hierarchy of the syndicate. Runners are mere pawns to be sacrificed; the controlling minds of the syndicates would be undeterred...