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Last year in August, it was on a Friday evening (14 August 2015) and I was at the Universal Studios Singapore with my friend as we had discounted tickets from my company. I was looking forward to a night of relaxation ad enjoyment with my best friend.
Then I received an SMS from an unknown number, telling me I would receive a call later. Then I received a call from a middle-aged woman who spoke Mandarin with the Chinese accent.
She asked me whether I was Marguerite's sister and I said, "Yes, what is it about? Who are you?"
She told me that my sister's husband was having an affair and was seeking my help to put a stop to it. She said the woman in question was her niece and she couldn't talk her out of it. She said my sister's husband kept visiting her niece at her apartment and her niece wasn't rejecting him She was in love with him. I said I needed time to think about it and would call her back. However, she told me that I could not call her back as she's going back to China in a few days.
I became very suspicious. I was thinking, "Who the hell can I contact after we end the call?" So I asked where she got my number from. She did not say directly. She just said it was easy to search for my number online. I guessed she didn't want to reveal the person who gave her my number. Anyway, I thought it might be a scam, that it might be some tricks to coerce money from me. So I decided to treat the call as the prankster's call and ignore it. Also, I didn't think an extra-marital affair had happened because my sister and her husband had been married for so long, so I assumed their marriage was rather stable. And so, I went on to enjoy my evening there at Universal Studios.
Then, 2 days later, during lunch hour, I received a call from a young lady. There was no caller ID, and so there was no way I was to call back this person once we ended the call. She told me her friend working at the casino was having an affairs with my sister's husband. She said she had counselled her friend for many times and couldn't stop, and so she wanted to take action to prevent the extra-marital affairs from taking another step further. She said she already had evidence because she had hired a private investigator. She wanted me to go and hire private investigator too to find out for myself the details of the affairs and then take action to stop my sister's husband from seeing her friend. And I told her, "Since you have all the evidence, why don't we arrange a time to meet together and you show me what you have got?" She refused. She said her job was to inform me what happened and my job now was to go and get my own evidence and take action. I asked her for her number and she refused too. This sounded like a scam because she only allowed one-way communication. So I decided to ignore the call again. But this time, I did call up my younger sister and asked her if she received similar calls. Her answer was affirmative and she said she would try to find out more.
I was thinking of making a police report but from my past experience, I felt I needed to wait for the third call because I had a strong reason that a scam was going on. But the third call never came.
That was all there was to it! I thought I had foiled a scam!
But bad news came one or two months later. My father sent me an SMS informing me that my sister was going through a divorce and the reason was just plainly "Difference of characters, can't get along."
Again, a lame reason given the Chinese husband, as lame as the reason he gave me when I questioned him why he needed to marry my sister that quickly. My worries were right. 7 years earlier, I warned my mother of a possible danger that this Chinese was using my sister to apply for Singapore Permanent Residency and a HDB apartment. All has come true. Only one year after they had moved into their new flat in Sengkang, this Chinese guy asked for a divorce and demanded that my sister returned all assets to him when my younger sister was the one who paid more for the house than him. He said my sister should be the one to give up the house and hand it to him. The divorce case is still on-going and he was sending threatening Whatsapp messages to my sister frequently telling her that he would meet her in court.
When the Chinese husband broke out the news late last year that he wanted a divorce, my sister was devastated. It took her nearly half a year to recover from the heart-break. Only now she has recovered a little to give the strength to go to different entities to ask for more information about what to do if a divorce is impending. She has to make trips to the bank, the Central Provident Fund (CPF) board, the Housing and Development Board (HDB), the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority of Singapore (ICA) agency to find out what she can do. But the Chinese husband wouldn't allow and warn her that if she continues to delay signing the divorce papers with him, he would ask his lawyer to bring this case to the court.
The Chinese husband is demanding that every asset (the house, the furniture) has to be returned to him. He is asking my sister to give up everything. This is absurd because he is just a foreigner. My sister is a Singapore citizenship and she was the one who helped him to get his Permanent Residency in Singapore. And now, he will not let my sister have a share of any asset. Furthermore, my mother went back on her words and she would not take any responsibility for what is currently happening. She even blamed my sister for giving her undue distress. A few days ago, my sister told me she couldn't take it no longer and wanted to end her life.
So now, I have to step in. Even when 7 years ago I told my mother I didn't care about what happened to my sister in the future and even when she told me sternly that my sister's marriage was not my business, I have to step in. After all, my sister is a kind soul. She doesn't deserve this kind of life. I'm going to my best to help.
I wonder how this will progress. In any case, you will get my update.
As you see, it wasn't an obvious marriage scam but that's because it was so well thought out and was executed over several years.
I hope this information will be useful for you.
News Links:
LOVE, LIES AND BORDERLINES
https://themigrationist.net/2015/04/22/love-lies-and-borderlines/
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