A few year ago, while working in another country, I bought an investment savings insurance plan on the recommendation of a representative from a Singapore bank. I learned later about the severe misrepresentations and undisclosed terms and conditions. The terms and conditions of the policy were never supplied to me, despite repeated writing to the bank for almost 15 months.
The representative took signatures from me and my wife on blank forms and assured us that he would send copies of the duly completed on his return to Singapore. But it never happened despite several written reminders to them.
The representative also fabricated the facts in the Financial Need Anlaysis form which included Risk analysis done for me. The said form was never discussed with me nor filled in by me. The representative’s office just emailed me the last page of such form and asked me to sign at the indicated place and return by fax the same. I did what was asked.
The receipt of fax was duly acknowledged by the bank. On the fax cover sheet, I mentioned that I was sending the last page of the form signed in blank as advised by them. It was also mentioned that my risk profile was a conservative investor and the purpose was to get a higher return compared to a time deposit.
Recently, after a lot of chasing, the bank has sent a copy of the form filled in by the representative. To my utter surprise, the information on the forms were all fabricated by the representative and he completely ignored my instructions on the fax cover sheet. He has shown me in the form as a Growth investor who can take higher risks with the money.
Based on such fabrication of a material document, the Bank is denying its liability of any kind for my investment loss.
Lesson: Never sign a blank form. Never trust a sales person who may act unethically.
4 comments:
It is a breach of the FAA if the insurance agent asks you to sign blank forms. You can lodge with MAS.
If you still have the original copy of the fax instruction you will win any suit against the agent. Such obscene disregard for the law must be dealt with severely and the agent brought to justice.
Signing a blank form for an agent is different from the agent forging client's signature. The former is a voluntary placing of trust. If the trust is abused, it's a matter between client and agent. The latter is a criminal offence.
I've come to be aware about many cases of pre-signed forms before. There're usually 3 main reasons for it: trust, convenience and speed.
Some examples are financial analysis forms, buy and sell forms. If a client trust an agent enough, it's not rare that the client gives the agent a stock of pre-signed forms.
What are these for? Quick execution of order. The client can just call up the agent and say, buy this or sell that, at certain desirable timing and pricing, and the agent can execute his order promptly without all the inconveniences of making appointments to meetup to sign this form or that form.
It's against MAS directive for agents to accept pre-signed forms, but once again, very hard to detect when both client and agent are willing parties. Problem usually comes to light when something goes wrong. Order execution at wrong pricing or wrong timing (whether intentionally or by neglect) causing more than tolerable losses instead of expected gains to the client concerned.
My personal advice to both sides, clients and agents, is: clients don't pre-sign blank forms; agents don't accept pre-signed forms.
In this day and age of internet and automation, another related problem has come to my notice. When client-agent trust relationship builds up, some clients can even give their online access passwords to agents.
The consumers are trusting and they do stupid things by signing blank forms.Agents exploit the stupidity and abuse it.
This is illegal.
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