SINGAPORE – A former car salesman who is accused of scamming multiple people was handed three more cheating charges on Wednesday, involving more than $95,000 in total.
Edwin Toh Jing Wei, 26, who was handed a cheating charge involving nearly $30,000 on Sept 9, now faces four charges over such offences.
With his three latest charges, he is now accused of cheating four people of cash totalling nearly $125,000.
Toh, after negotiating vehicle purchase agreements with the alleged victims, is said to have told them to make payments for the deposit and insurance by transferring money to a bank account that purportedly belonged to his then employer, Privilege Motors.
The account actually belonged to the man, and no payments were made to the company, the police said in an earlier statement.
The four separate incidents allegedly took place between Aug 29 and Sept 5.
On Sept 7, the police received multiple separate reports from people who claimed they had lost money in a scam run by a salesman with a local vehicle dealer. The amount totalled more than $100,000.
Officers arrested him that day in Jurong West Street 52, less than 12 hours after the first report was made.
A spokesman for Privilege Motors had earlier said it has since honoured all the related purchases, even though Toh had allegedly taken the money.
The spokesman also said that when the company found out about the alleged scam, it immediately made a police report and terminated Toh’s employment.
He added: “We also reached out to each affected customer immediately and have delivered the cars. We hope that people will continue to trust Privilege Motors.”
Toh’s case has been adjourned to Oct 12.
For each count of cheating, an offender can be jailed for up to 10 years and fined.
Ex-CarTimes salesman allegedly swipes payments from customer totalling $172k
More than $500,000 lost to vehicle-related scams since December 2022
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