41-year-old female Chinese national Wu Hong, was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment on 15 February after cheating at least 5 victims of about $2.16 million.
Among her victims are veteran Singapore actresses Tan Lee Peng (Chen Liping) and Lim Mooi Keow (Lin Meijiao), who lost $273,000 and $186,000.
Wu faced 5 cheating charges which she pleaded not guilty to, and was convicted after a trial – she is also facing another 12 charges of cheating involving another $3.4 million and several other victims, and will be dealt with separately.
Context
The actresses Tan and Lim met Wu through their mutual friend Soh Choon Heong, and Soh met Wu through a Fengshui master.
The prosecution said that Wu cheated them into believing that she had an investment scheme that provides Chinese nationals who ware visiting Singapore with money to gamble in local casinos.
Wu convinced her victims with high returns and asked them to invest more on the scheme, which didn’t exist.
Both actresses were called to the stand and testified against Wu in court, with Wu arguing that the victims had offered her loans and that Soh was the perpetrator of the scams and that she was only a middleman.
Wu was then confronted with her $2 million expenditure in casinos over 4 years and she claimed that she “helped people gamble” but also gambled her own money in smaller amounts.
Casino deposit records were then pulled out in court and showed that 75% of the money that Soh and her friends lost was traced to deposits into Wu’s casino accounts.
Wu was eventually convicted of her 5 cheating charges at the end of the trial.