Marc Tay Yi Jie, 25, was sentenced to 2.5 years jail after he was found guilty of scamming 24 people amounting to $32,928. He has pleaded guilty to 9 counts of cheating while another 18 charges were taken into consideration during his sentencing.
Marcfvv He turned to scams as a way to support himself after he was disowned by his parents.
According to the court documents, Marc was involved in several scams including selling of NTUC vouchers, Face Mask and Hand Sanitizers on various e-commerce platforms such as Carousell and Facebook Marketplace. He also ran two other scams that involved loans and camera rental.
Since Apr 2018, Marc has been getting financial support from a church acquaintance for his daily expenses. In total, Marc has loaned at least $11,000 from his acquaintance and would lie to his acquaintance that his company was withholding his salary which made him unable to repay his loan. So far, Marc has only managed to repay his acquaintance one-tenth of the amount he owes.
In Mar 2020, Marc decided to take the opportunity to scam people in view of the pandemic. He would advertise himself as a seller selling essential items. He would ask interested buyers to pay him a deposit or make the full payment via Paynow or PayLah.
With this method, he had scammed 2 women for a total of $1040 for 330 bottles of hand sanitizers, 124 boxes of mask and 19 thermometers. In Apr 2020, he scammed another woman for $1,625 whiling selling NTUC vouchers on Facebook.
Separately, Marc has also scammed 2 camera rental company late last year where he rented 2 different cameras and sold them off for $1,500 and $1,700 respectively.
According to the law, for each of the cheating charges that Marc faced, he could be jailed up to 10 years and fined.