Saturday, April 09, 2011

Cheating and enforcement of the law

I read a news report that a person was sent to jail for pretending to be the owner of a travel agency operating a popular website and collecting money for a package tour from the victim. This is the offence of cheating.

Cheating is a crime that is punishable by a jail sentence. It involves misrepresentation (e.g. pretending to be somebody else) and collecting money from a victim. Actually, the crime is more broadly defining as taking any property (and not just money) from the victim.

It is easy to prove misrepresentation when the offender pretends to be somebody else. But there are other forms of misrepresentation, such as misrepresenting the value of a product that is sold (e.g. selling gold bar, wine or land plots at inflated prices) and giving a unjustified projection of their further appreciation in value.

It is the duty of the government, through the police department, to enforce the law in the case of criminal offences. They have to receive the complaints and investigate it to see if an offence has been committed. I do not expect the police to spend too much time for the investigation, especially if the information is sketchy or unreliable. But if the information is sufficient or the complaint is made by several victims, the police should investigate and treat it as a matter of public interest.

There is the excuse that the police does not have sufficient resources and there are too many cases to follow up. The solution is to recruit more police officers and investigators.  Even if it is difficult to gather sufficient evidence to prosecute the offenders, the policy should still investigate the complaint, as the investigation would deter the offenders from continuing their activities.

In recent years, there were heating cases that has involved many people. They were not investigated due to lack of resources. The victims were asked to get a lawyer to take a civil case. I hope that the police department and the ministry of home affairs will review their current stand on this type of cases.

Tan Kin Lian

9 comments:

zhummmeng said...

What about insurance agents?
They misrepresent themselves as EXECUTIVE FINANCIAL CONSULTANTS when they are only salesmen.
They mislead consumers by posing as financial experts, they can plan insurance and investment.
Don't they mislead others by claiming they are retirement planner when they are merely peddling endowment products that disguised as retirement products.
When they push products upfront they compromise the cleints' needs, tell half truths and half lies are they not cheats.
Aren't the sales champions cheats when they lie to their customers that they are financial experts?
They are all cheats when they misrepresent and mislead the consumers into thinking they are financial experts when they are only salesmen and women peddling koyok products with high commission.

Chee Ming said...

I would like to cite Japan as an example of "cracking" a case.

When a crime happened, Japanese police will go and "evaluate" the crime to determine whether the case can be cracked easily.

Once they determine the crime can be solved easily (i.e, the evidences all points to a particular suspect), they will then categorize the case as "criminal case" and investigation will be carried out. In a short while, the case was solved and the "criminal" (Why the ""? Well, sometimes, getting someone to confess is a easier way to solve a case) was caught, justice served.

What happens if the case is not straight forward and evidence cannot be gathered easily? Then it will be categorized as another case, like suicide, accident, unsolved case. No one will look into these case as they deem it not worth their effort. Unless it is a case that created social uproar but that's another issue.

So when a country claims that they have a highly efficient police force because they can crack a case and catch the criminal fast, maybe we should take another look and ask, "Was it their method of categorizing crime that made them efficient?"

(Knowledge of Japanese police forces modus operandi came from Freakonomics)

yujuan said...

Ever since the casinos start operating here, there are more
1. Employees siphoning off company
funds.
2. More burglaries in the
residential and commercial
areas, and more police warning
about such cases by setting up
notice boards.
3. More foreign tourists coming to
pick pockets and steal instead
of going to the Zoo.
4. More foreign workers losing
interest in their work,
engrossed in how to make back
casino losses.
Singapore now is very different from the past years, now we have to strenthen security in our own homes and offices, casting a suspicious eye on the foreign maids and workers around us, constantly upgrading security systems on our Company and Bank Accounts. Simply, we only trust ourselves now, even our friends, employees, longtime bankers, and family members are suspect. All these changes owing to the existence of the casinos? Or people
resort to this as they could not cope with the high costs of living,
whichever.

DareToAct said...

The top echelon of our government has to me the misconception that as long as there are a handful of very smart people formulating policies, those "good policies" can be executed by just anyone. The pay structure of the government sector tells it all. This misconception is based on old economic model (buy one good machine and has a good procedure, then get cheap labour to press buttons) which is increasingly a misfit in our new world. Good policies need good people down the line to execute. Not so good policies need feedbacks from the people down the line to rectify. Sadly, we do not have that in Singapore now.

Vincent Sear said...

Cheating is a criminal offence under Sec. 415 Cap. 224 actionable by police. When you lodge the report, insist to IO on it, but providing your grounds of course.

zhummmeng said...

More coming here to visit our laundery shops which there are many in Singapore.

Vincent Sear said...

Job titles doesn't fall into cheating category. Extravangantly elevated but still not statutory cheating. Insurance agents are now known as insurance advisors. Agency managers are now known as financial planning directors.

The government practise this themselves. Junior police officers doing constabulary jobs are now Cpls. and Sgts. Inspectors are now ranked ASPs and DSPs. Captains and Majors are now Colonels and BGs.

zhummmeng said...

Vincent, the titles mislead the consumers into thinking the insurance agents are financial experts but who are actually salesmen peddling products for commission. The titles misrepresent and it is cheating the customers who trust their financial expertise to help them meet their goals.
If it is not can I call myself professor of finance or have a fake PhD after my name?
Remember the Clemen Chiang's case? . He was hauled by the law for misrepresenting to this customers that he was an expert on 'financial option trading' with a PhD bought from degree mill.
Insurance agents are salesmen .If they use financial titles in the hope to mislead their customers into beleiving they are experts in finance when they are not it is cheating, isn't it?

Vincent Sear said...

I'm of course disagreeable with cheating and misrepresentation. But law is law, and there'd be laws not favoring the lower educated and disadvantaged wherever we are in the world. We can only do what we can to help.

Blog Archive