Singaporean Payroll Officer Jailed for Nearly 10 Years for $4.2m Crypto Fraud

A former ByBit payroll officer called Ho Kai Xin is sentenced to 9 years and 11 months in prison for misappropriating $4.2 million in cryptocurrency. Before the sentencing, a court order froze her assets, but she continued spending on luxury goods which saw her initially sentenced to six weeks in prison for contempt.

A Lavish Lifestyle

Ho Kai Xin worked for a company called WeChain Fintech, which was in charge of managing ByBit’s payroll. As a payroll officer, she controlled spreadsheets that listed all employee benefits.

She used her access to manipulate transactions, and she inserted fraudulent crypto transfers into her own wallet by masking them as employee payments. She ran the fraud from May to August 2022 – a period in which she made eight unauthorized payments worth 4.2 million USDT.

Moreover, she then converted the stolen USDT into fiat and transferred the funds to several bank accounts. Ho used the money to buy various luxury goods – a $3.7m penthouse, a Mercedes-Benz AMG A45 and several Louis Vuitton products.

Legal Consequences

In February 2023, a WeChain employee alerted the police about Ho’s fraudulent transactions, and she was arrested two months later. She then lied to the investigation offers saying that a purported cousin called “Jason Teo” was the man in charge of the transactions. It wasn’t long before it was proven that Teo doesn’t exist.

Public prosecutors told the court that when Ho realized her actions could go undetected, she became emboldened, thus going on a spending and cheating spree that drained her company big amounts of money.

According to the prosecution, Ho transferred massive amounts of digital currency from ByBit’s electronic wallet into four of her own and even defied a civil court order by spending $840,000 on luxury goods.

As a result, Ho Kai Xin was sentenced to nine years and 11 months of jail time after she pleaded guilty to 14 charges. ByBit recovered 1.17 million USDT and $141,787.11 from her bank account, but Ho didn’t repay the rest.