23-year-old Mohamed Iskandar Mohamed Ansari, a full-time national serviceman (NSF) with the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) was sentenced to 3 months and 5 weeks imprisonment on 27 February after pleading guilty to a charge of theft and an offence under the Computer Misuse Act.
Iskander, who was a corporal at the time of the offence, and his alleged accomplice 21-year-old fellow SCDF NSF Nizar Syafiq Ismadi, stole his subordinate’s phone, assessed his bank account and stole $690.
The two accused and the victim were NSFs who served at the 3rd SCDF Division in Yishun.
The victim, 23-year-old Leon Tay, a lance corporal, has since completed his national service.
What happened?
Sometime before August 2022, Iskandar and Nizam were planning to “do something big to Leon”, which the latter understood as meaning making Tay’s life miserable by taking away his mobile phone.
On 1 August 2022 at about 7.30am, Iskandar and Tay were having their 24-hour duty shift at the RSM office, and Tay was about to leave the office at 9am to man the guard room, where he was not allowed to use his phone – Iskandar told him to leave his phone behind in the office.
Tay did as he was told and Iskandar then kept the phone, worth $1,149, for himself.
Tay later returned to the office about 1 hour later and found his phone missing, and Iskandar lied about it when asked, claiming that Tay had already collected it.
Iskandar then told Nizar about what he did and the two of them agreed to sell it to the second-hand phone shop for $600, with Nizar keeping the SIM card.
The phone was later exported out of Singapore, and Tay couldn’t afford to buy himself another phone.
On 5 August 2022, Iskandar pretended to help Tay find his phone by using the Find My Phone app that he had on his own phone.
Iskandar had Tay use his phone to log in to his Gmail account, and he then pressed “show password” and revealed the victim’s login information, before sending him away.
Nizar then downloaded the POSB banking app on his own phone and used Tay’s SIM card in the device.
Iskandar and Nizar then managed to log in to Tay’s bank account and emptied it, transferring $690 into Iskandar’s account via PayNow.
Iskandar then transferred $300 to Nizar before spending the remainder of the money on alcohol.
Tay found out about the transaction when he checked his email and saw Iskandar’s phone number in it, and he then reported the incident to the police after confronting Iskandar on the phone.
Iskandar had offered to compensate Tay, but the latter refused to accept it because he felt Iskandar was not behaving in an acceptable manner.
Iskandar was released on bail and expected to surrender himself on 24 April to being his prison sentence.