SINGAPORE: A man who was working as a customer relations officer at Marina Square Shopping Mall used his position to fraudulently obtain S$27,915 (US$21,700) in e-vouchers for use in the mall.
Aravindran Vallaban, a 26-year-old Malaysian, was on Friday (Jan 2) sentenced to 20 months’ jail after he pleaded guilty to one charge of cheating and dishonestly inducing a delivery of property under Section 420 of the Penal Code.
Three other charges were taken into consideration during sentencing.
Between May 13, 2024, and Apr 3, 2025, he created 2,172 fraudulent Marina Square membership accounts. This was after the mall launched a referral campaign in April 2024 to increase membership applications.
The referral campaign required new membership applicants to use referral codes from existing members. Upon a new member’s successful registration, both the new member and the referring member would receive S$5 in e-vouchers credited to their accounts, which could be used at stores in the mall or transferred as e-gifts to other accounts.
To complete the registration, new members had to verify their identities using one-time passwords (OTPs) that would be generated and sent to their mobile devices.
WHAT HAPPENED
At the time, Aravindran was employed as an assistant customer relations supervisor at Singapore Land Group, the parent company of Marina Centre Holdings, which in turn owns Marina Square. His job duties included handling customer enquiries and assisting with the mall’s promotions and redemptions.
As part of his role, he was given access to an in-house customer relationship management system used to manage customer data for the mall. Through his account, he could view store listings, member lists and voucher issuance details.
His supervisor also had access to the system, but possessed superior access rights that gave him access to additional information and features unavailable to the lower-ranking customer relations officers.
With his rights, the supervisor was able to view all the OTPs that had been generated and sent to the phone numbers of people who had signed up for Marina Square membership. This was so that the customer relations staff could manually retrieve an OTP and send it to a customer in the event that the customer did not receive the OTP.
For convenience, the supervisor shared his login credentials for his management system account with Aravindran, so that Aravindran could assist customers who needed help in obtaining their OTPs without needing to consult the supervisor.
Aravindran used his access to the OTPs to circumvent the Marina Square membership account verification process and create the fraudulent accounts.
He would first generate fake phone numbers using ChatGPT and use those numbers to sign up for new membership accounts.
He would then use his supervisor’s management system account to manually obtain the OTPs associated with the fake numbers to complete the registration of the fraudulent accounts.
Whenever he created a new fraudulent account, he would use referral codes from existing Marina Square membership accounts, inducing S$5 e-vouchers to be credited into both accounts.
This enabled him to accumulate the S$27,915 in e-vouchers, which he used for his own personal expenditure in the mall.
Aravindran was eventually caught after a deputy general marketing manager at Marina Centre Holdings noticed that certain member accounts were getting an abnormally large number of referral e-vouchers.
The company later discovered that many of the referred accounts had invalid phone numbers. A review of internal logs showed that many of the fraudulent accounts shared the same device ID as the one associated with Aravindran’s Marina Square membership account.
On Apr 17 this year, the deputy general marketing manager lodged a police report against Aravindran for cheating the company.
In the State Courts’ statement of facts issued on Dec 3, Deputy Public Prosecutor Ryan Lim said Aravindran committed an amalgamated cheating offence under Section 420 of the Penal Code, read with Section 124 of the Criminal Procedure Code.
Aravindran has made full restitution of S$27,915 to Marina Centre Holdings, he noted.
The prosecution had sought at least 22 months’ jail for Aravindran, citing deterrence as the main sentencing consideration.
Aravindran could have been jailed for up to 20 years and also faced caning or a fine, or both.