Keywords: electronic invoicing, einvoicing, e-invoicing, invoice fraud, fraud from Singapore

Multi-million dollar invoice fraud in Singapore

Matthew Garrow-Fisher | News | 15 May 2012

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A 60-year-old businessman has been jailed in Singapore after committing invoice fraud surmounting to $15.3m Singapore dollars.

Eric Lee Chin Khuay, sole shareholder and Director of security services firm Gatekeeper Resources was last week sentenced to 18 months in prison for making 117 fraudulent applications of invoices and delivery orders under the names of four different companies.

He was found responsible for creating all of the invoice applications, filing them with three banks, namely DBS, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC Bank) and Standard Chartered Bank, The New Paper reported.

The court heard that Mr Lee committed invoice fraud by making use of his close relationships with friends working for three of the four companies used in the scam.

One of the companies was Charisma Trading Services and according to the news provider, the only signatory of the firm's OCBC current account, Danny Tan, allowed Mr Lee to use the account to credit funds back to Gatekeeper Resources, instructing him to issue a cheque once the funds had been received.

Mr Lee told his friend that he did not want Gatekeeper Resources' suppliers to know who the buyers were and he did not reveal the source of the funds to Mr Tan.

Allowing him to pay the banks for financing that was due, Mr Lee also created nine false sales agreements between his company and Thailand-based firms.

The incidences were committed between May 2008 and July 2010 and it was not until the Commercial Affairs Department was informed of a possible finance fraud in September 2010 before investigations into the matter were carried out.

It is possible that the banks would have been alerted sooner when the fraud started in 2008 if they had used more efficient payment systems such as e-invoicing, which not only ensures that payments are made on time, but also helps to eliminate human errors and fraud.