Jail for ex-dealer who made $255k from illegally manipulating SGX stock prices

For eight months, former dealer Oh Wee Hian manipulated the prices of six Singapore Exchange (SGX) counters by causing small share price movements and profiting from the fluctuations.

- Toh Yong Chuan

These quick-fire deals involved small trades that were placed and cancelled within seconds to spoof the market prices in the trading system.

Oh repeated the ruse 215 times between August 2020 and March 2021, resulting in $255,385 in illicit gains.

On Oct 28, Oh, a 46-year-old Singaporean, was sentenced by District Judge Christopher Goh Eng Chiang to nine months in jail in the biggest case of stock market price spoofing detected in SGX.

From 2005 to 2009, Oh worked as a dealer at brokerages UOB Kay Hian, Credit Suisse Securities (Singapore) and Citigroup Global Markets Singapore Securities where he honed his stock market trading skills.

He was also a web developer and had been unemployed since 2018.

He hatched his plan to manipulate SGX stock prices some time before August 2020.

To do so, he set up two accounts: a trading account with OCBC Securities to trade shares on SGX and a trading account with brokerage IG Asia that offers, among its specialist products, the trading of contracts for differences (CFD).

In CFD trading, a person can trade on the price movements of shares without actually buying or selling them. It was the main tool in Oh's deception.

Court papers described how Oh manipulated or spoofed the prices of shares in a series of methodical moves that he took just seconds to execute each time.

To lower the price of a counter, he would first use his OCBC account to sell small quantities of 100 to 200 shares at prices below what buyers were offering to pay.