His highest educational qualification was the Primary School Leaving Examination or PSLE. But that didn’t stop him from wanting to work as a project manager in the civil engineering sector as he had heard that it was a lucrative job.

To get jobs in the field, Alexier Chin Ming Lik, now 49, forged a degree scroll for a first class honours in civil engineering from the National University of Singapore (NUS), and certificates from the Manpower Ministry (MOM) and Singapore Contractors Association, among others.

He was so successful that between 2013 and 2017, the serial conman held jobs at 38 companies in the industry and drew salaries ranging from $3,500 to $9,000 a month.

At the State Courts on Tuesday (March 5), Chin was jailed for two years and 11 months, and also fined $1,600. He pleaded guilty to eight out of 21 charges, mainly for forgery.

Moved quickly between jobs to avoid suspicion

In his resume, Chin purported to have 16 years’ experience and pretended to have worked previously for several top construction companies. He moved quickly between jobs to avoid raising suspicion about his bogus qualifications.

But his deception unravelled when a prospective employer who had sought verification of his forged degree scroll with NUS led to the university making a police report in December 2016.

The previous month, Chin was offered a project manager job but turned it down as he considered the offer monthly salary of $7,500 to be too low. He then went for another interview and it was around this time that the police report was made.

After the police report was made, Chin was placed on a stoplist.

On 23 April 2017, he was stopped at Woodlands Checkpoint on 23 April 2017. At the time, he was driving with only a provisional driving licence as he had been disqualified from driving since 1992 and was in the process of getting his driving licence again. He admitted to driving four different cars without a licence over the past 10 years.

Chin came clean about his forgery offences. For the fake NUS degree scroll, Chin printed out an image of an actual NUS degree scroll from the Internet, overlaid a slip of paper with his own name over the document in the relevant field and photocopied it.

He carried out the same ruse for a forged Building Construction Supervisors Safety Course Certificate from MOM, after he found a copy of an actual certificate in an office where he previously worked at.

Chin forged a CGE ‘A’ level certificate in a similar manner. He found a photocopy of a colleague’s A level certificate in a previous job in 2012. He made use of the bogus certificate for job applications from 2013 onwards.

In September 2015, Chin also made a statutory declaration stating that he had misplaced 10 original certificates when he was moving house. He wanted to excuse his inability to provide original copies of his forged certificates for verification in his future employment applications.

In September 2017, Chin also stole two packs of diapers and two packets of rice from an NTUC Fairprice supermarket at Bedok North Street 1.

For his forgery offences, Chin could have been jailed for up to 10 years along with a fine.

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