Beautician jailed over fake casino chips scheme

This article is more than 12 months old

Aug 02, 2016 06:00 am

A beautician was jailed for seven months yesterday for conspiring with three others to use counterfeit chips at Marina Bay Sands (MBS).

Tang Shiwei, 26, a Chinese national and a Singapore permanent resident, faced 12 charges of exchanging fake chips with a face value of $1,000 each at MBS for cash on Nov 22 last year. In all, she exchanged a total of 30 counterfeit $1,000 chips for a total of $30,000 in cash. Her total reward was $600.

Runners were recruited by a transnational counterfeit casino chip syndicate to exchange more than a thousand $1,000 denomination casino chips at MBS. The runners were to first exchange a few fake chips at gaming tables for genuine ones of small denominations, and then mix the genuine chips with the remaining fake chips and exchange the chips at cashier counters for cash.

MBS first detected the fake chips on Nov 29 last year. It immediately conducted a recall exercise for all $1,000 casino chips and reported the matter to the police. The total amount of losses suffered by MBS exceeded $1 million.