Jail for man who cheated around RM345,000 from Carousell users who pre-ordered Pokemon, One Piece trading cards

SINGAPORE — To fund his hobby of collecting watches and football trading cards, Aizil A Rahim misappropriated nearly S$115,000 from 25 Carousell users who had paid him for trading cards of Japanese anime and manga series Pokemon and One Piece.

When he failed to deliver the cards and his customers grew increasingly suspicious, Aizil made a police report and lied that a Japanese man named “Nagashima” had defrauded him of S$30,000.

On Thursday (July 4), Aizil, 28, was sentenced to 16 months and eight weeks’ jail, or about 1.5 years’ jail.

He had pleaded guilty to a charge of furnishing false information to a public servant, four charges of criminal breach of trust and five charges of amalgamated criminal breach of trust. These charges are related to S$88,510 in losses.

Another 16 charges of criminal breach of trust involving the rest of the money were taken into consideration during sentencing.

Aizil will begin his sentence on July 11.

Victims were former customers

Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Tay Jia En told the court that in mid-2022, Aizil started selling Pokemon and One Piece trading cards on Carousell through two accounts called “Liangpopo” and “Liangpupu”.

He would take pre-orders from customers and would source for the trading cards from a supplier in Singapore.

Early last year, he started getting addicted to collecting watches and expensive football trading cards, spending nearly S$40,000 on both hobbies.

Around the same time, he had gone on no-pay leave from his job at a real estate media company.

Needing a “steady source of income” to fund his expenses, he decided to advertise pre-orders for Pokemon and One Piece trading cards that were yet to be released. He priced the pre-orders for Pokemon 151 cards at S$1,700 to S$1,860 for one case of cards.

Court documents did not state how much Aizil priced the One Piece cards.

Customers would pre-order these cards from him and transfer the money to him. In return, he was supposed to deliver the cards once they were released from July to September 2023.

These customers were mostly people he had sold to before, having “already gained their trust and obtained positive ratings from them”, DPP Tay said, adding that these ratings also made it easier for Aizil to attract new customers.

However, instead of using the money he received to get the cards for his customers, Aizil spent it on his hobbies, shopping, a staycation, trading stocks and betting on football at lottery operator Singapore Pools.

As the deadline to deliver the cards drew closer, Aizil started another pre-order advertisement between July and October 2023. He planned to use the earnings to buy cards for his customers from the first round of pre-orders.

When the initial group of customers who pre-ordered started to chase Aizil for the trading cards, he would make up several excuses. These included the cards being detained by Singapore Customs, that he had been hospitalised and that his supplier failed to ship the cards to him.

However, this “rolling” scheme failed when Aizil could not get the money to refund his customers or fulfil orders because the price of the cards increased.

He then stopped being in contact with his customers, prompting his customers to file police reports against him. His Carousell accounts were also later suspended.

Lied to the police

On one occasion, after meeting a customer in person and lying to her that he could not fulfil the order because he had been scammed, Aizil made a police report on June 28, 2023.

Between lodging the report and early July in 2023, he lied to the investigation officer several times that he had met a Japanese man named Nagashima sometime around October and November 2022.

Aizil claimed that he had paid Nagashima S$30,000 for Pokemon cards, but Nagashima later made several excuses for why he had not delivered the cards or provided shipment tracking details.

He also provided screenshots of a purported conversation he had with Nagashima on messaging platform Telegram about the cards.

However, on July 5, 2023, Aizil admitted to investigators that he had been lying and that Nagashima did not exist. Court documents did not state why he decided to do this.

DPP Tay said: “He created an imaginary person because he understood that Pokemon 151 Cards are from Japan, so a Japanese name will make it sound like he, the accused, had actually met this person who collected the money from him.”

The reason why Aizil filed his online police report was to show his customers that he was not a scammer and for use as evidence for his customers in the event that they go to his house to demand for the promised cards, DPP Tay added.

The prosecution sought a jail term of 17 to 23 months and one to two weeks, noting that 25 victims were affected by Aizil’s actions and that he had “carefully devised his plan to ‘roll’ the funds collected from the second wave of pre-orders to fulfil the requirements of the first wave of pre-orders”.

“Had his plan not unravelled because of the drastic increase in price of the Pokemon 151 Cards, his scheme may have gone unnoticed,” DPP Tay said.

She also said that Aizil merely paid his victims S$9,287.37 back in total, which paled in comparison to the total loss of S$114,885.

For criminal breach of trust, Aizil could have been jailed for up to seven years or fined, or both. The penalty is doubled for amalgamated charges.

For furnishing false information to a public servant, he could have been jailed for up to six months or fined up to S$5,000, or both. —Today