Nov 22 2023, 04:41 PM, updated 3y ago
Tan Kian Yi, a 35-year-old Malaysian, was sentenced to three years and four months' jail on Wednesday (Nov 22).
The court heard that Tan, a sales manager, was part of a syndicate comprising five other members from Malaysia and Taiwan.
He first met two of them - Hung Yu-Wen and Chou Yu-Lun, a couple from Taiwan - in the Philippines in August 2022.
Hung asked Tan if he was interested in winning money in a game of baccarat. She knew Tan had an interest in card counting and that he had attended a class on advantage play in 2019.
The class was held in Taipei, and taught people how to count cards, how the interior of a shuffler machine looked like and how it worked.
Hung then told Tan that she was going to Singapore to do a survey on how the game of 7UP Baccarat was played at the Marina Bay Sands casino.
Tan agreed to join her there, as he wanted to learn how to win money through the game.
In October 2022, Tan and the couple met in Singapore, staying at the MBS hotel and visiting the casino to observe how the game was played.
They met a month later at a casino in Manila, where Hung told Tan she had a formula that could enable them to win the game.
The formula was developed by a man she called her "teacher", and the syndicate intended to use this formula to skew the odds of the game in its favour.
Hung showed Tan the formula on her laptop. It was in the form of an Excel sheet, and Hung showed Tan how to use it.
She gave him a set of codes to memorise, referring to the values and suits of the cards in the game. She also told Tan that he should key the codes into the sheet after someone else transmitted the information to him.
To use the formula, the syndicate would need someone to transmit information on the cards dealt to the person operating the formula, who would key in the values into the Excel sheet.
The formula would then predict and generate the game's next outcome.
At this, Tan asked if his friend, 45-year-old Malaysian Chai Hee Keong, could join the syndicate.
Hung agreed and promised to give Tan and Chai 20 per cent of the syndicate's winnings.
She created a group chat on LINE, with a Chinese name that described a "work group" in Singapore.
The chat was used to keep track of how much capital each syndicate member started off with, the time they clocked in and out at the table, as well as the winnings or losses made.
The group arrived in Singapore in December 2022 to execute their plan. They were assigned roles to play – ranging from a marksman, a sorcerer, a tank and an auxiliary.
Tan was both a marksman and a tank. In the first role, he would be stationed in a hotel room where he received information that he keyed into the formula and told the sorcerer how to bet.
The sorcerer was a female member of the syndicate who wore Bluetooth-connected earphones hidden by her long hair, so she could communicate with the marksman.
Tan's second role involved him placing high bets at the table based on instructions relayed to him by the sorcerer.
Each of the syndicate's members started off with S$100,000 worth casino chips.
Over several days in December 2022, they received winnings from their games using their scheme. At one point, one of the other members wanted to know how the formula worked as he felt very impressed by it, but Hung did not want to share the specifics with him.
Between Dec 16 and Dec 23 last year, casino employees began to take notice of the syndicate's conduct, by going through closed-circuit television footage.
On Dec 24, 2022, one of the members went alone to the casino to gamble. He was taken to a room by security officers and the police later arrested him.
Source: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/f...-casino-3938776
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