SINGAPORE: For more than a year, a supervisor at Marks & Spencer noted down customers’ credit card details, which he used to buy almost S$9,000 worth of meals.
Teo Kai Seng, 29, was on Monday (Aug 29) jailed for three months after pleading guilty to three charges under the Computer Misuse Act. Eight similar charges were considered for sentencing.
The court heard that Teo worked at Marks & Spencer from 2016 to 2021. He was promoted to supervisor at the One Raffles Place outlet in March 2020.
Around the time of his promotion, Teo started taking down the credit card details of customers while their card payments were being processed at the cashier.
He did this whenever he attended to customers at the cash register and there were only two other staff members working in the kitchen and the office.
Teo would use his mobile phone to take a photo of the credit card, then transfer the details to a piece of paper. He later keyed them into the Waitrr app, where he had registered an account using his ex-girlfriend’s phone number.
Waitrr allows users to order food online and pay vendors directly. Teo realised that the app did not require a one-time password for transactions, and decided to exploit this.
Teo would offer to buy food for his colleagues, claiming that the Waitrr app gave him a 10 per cent discount and he would extend the savings to them.
He paid for the meals using the victims’ credit card details, and his colleagues paid him back for their meals in return.
Most of the victims did not require their banks to give them SMS notifications when transactions were made on their credit cards or savings accounts.
This allowed Teo’s offences to go undetected until Oct 27, 2020, when the daughter of a victim lodged the first police report. Teo was traced and arrested on Aug 24, 2021.
From Jul 13, 2020 to his arrest, Teo used credit card details belonging to 11 victims aged 46 to 82, performing 450 unauthorised transactions.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Chee Ee Ling sought three to five months’ jail, highlighting the level of premeditation and planning involved in Teo’s offences.
For each charge, Teo could have been jailed for up to two years, fined up to S$5,000 or both. The maximum penalties are raised to three years’ jail and a S$10,000 fine for a repeat conviction.