He used the money to pay for personal expenses such as his mother’s surgery fees and credit card loans, business expenses, and to make restitution to some victims when they found out about his crime.
Yesterday, Koo was jailed for two years and eight months after pleading guilty to three counts of forgery for the purpose of cheating. Three other similar charges were taken into consideration for sentencing.
The 35-year-old Singaporean worked for Great Eastern Life Assurance at the time of his offences from 2017 to 2019. He was fired from the insurer in early 2019 after his actions came to light.
The court heard that he came up with a ploy to sell his existing clients’ insurance policies, known as resale policies, to the victims. These policies are typically surrendered by their policyholders before maturity and can be sold to a third party.
However, those policies that Koo peddled were held by clients who had not said that they wanted to surrender them. Koo then told his victims that he was able to sell them these policies and that they were exclusive to clients who had already bought certain plans.
He forged certain documents to support his scheme, typing them up on a Microsoft Word document using his personal laptop and pasting the Great Eastern logo there. This included maturity benefits letters, bank details letters, and “official receipts”.
He also used genuine Great Eastern purchase documents, forging the signatures of the purported original policyholders on these forms or representing himself to be the beneficial owner.
Koo told one victim, a 46-year-old Japanese man, that the resale policies were sold exclusively to high net worth clients who had bought Universal Life and Prestige Life plans. The man then bought four “resale policies” valued at S$105,000 from July to November 2018. When he did not receive any policy documents from Great Eastern, he tried to clarify things with Koo.
Before Koo could respond, the victim found out from another victim that the policies were not genuine. He contacted Koo for a refund and Koo made restitution of S$1,000 within a day or so. When the agent was placed under investigation, he cheated a 48-year-old woman who had hired him because his father-in-law previously tutored her daughters.
Koo cheated her of S$130,500 between July 2018 and June 2019, forging 27 documents to do so. He paid her about S$100,000 in the form of “maturity proceeds” and also made further restitution of S$3,200. She discovered what had happened only in April 2019 when Koo told her that he was leaving Great Eastern for another company and she contacted her new Great Eastern representative to ask about the “resale policies”.
Great Eastern has paid restitution to the victims. Koo entered into an agreement with his former employer to pay off the sums in instalments as well. He defaulted on the arrangement in January this year and has not paid back S$96,000.
For each offence, Koo could have been jailed for up 10 years and fined.
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