The chat group is no longer accessible but had more than 44,000 members when it was still active. Several women had called out the group after discovering their photos were shared there.
Between March 15 and October 3 in 2019, the police received 31 reports island-wide and arrested Liong, who was self-employed, along with three others.
Two have been sentenced to probation for distributing obscene material in the group, while the case of another administrator – Leonard Teo Min Xuan – is pending.
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Liong on Tuesday pleaded guilty to six charges in total, including two under the Women’s Charter as well as possession and transmission of obscene material. Eight other similar charges were taken into consideration for sentencing.
The court heard that 29 members of SG Nasi Lemak, which was created in November 2018, had administrative rights. Liong used the moniker “Crazy Rich Asian” in the group. He had developed a close relationship with a sex worker from China in 2016, whom he frequented often.
She then introduced him to another China national known as Hua Ge, who asked Liong to help him promote female sex workers from China featured on a vice website known as “sex727”.
Liong agreed, downloading pictures, posts and videos from the website to repost on various social media platforms.
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Between 2016 and his arrest three years later, he posted advertisements of the women on a Twitter account. He mainly used his Asus laptop to download the material, and used his Samsung mobile phone to retweet or check responses to the Twitter posts.
When the SG Nasi Lemak chat group was formed, he posted advertisements there with his iPhone.
He received weekly payments in cash for his services, ranging from S$300 to S$800, collected from different women from mainland China.
About 4am on October 14, 2019, the police conducted a coordinated operation. Liong was arrested at his Marine Parade residence and his electronic devices were seized.
He was initially highly uncooperative and refused to provide passwords or access codes for the devices.
When his case was referred to the Criminal Investigation Department’s Specialised Crime Branch, he gradually became more forthcoming and eventually provided the code for his Telegram account, in order to access SG Nasi Lemak.
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In mitigation, Liong’s lawyer R.S. Bajwa said he had merely uploaded obscene material “along with everyone else in the group”. “He shouldn’t have done it,” acknowledged the lawyer, who later also asked the court to grant a gag order preventing the media from publishing Liong’s photograph.
Liong’s wife had asked for this, Bajwa said, as the couple had two young sons aged nine and 11 who were “very impressionable” and would be “very embarrassed and ridiculed if he was identified”. This was despite his photo already having been published recently.
“A gag order is to protect young children, usually a victim. In this case, it’s to protect his own children from what he has done,” Bajwa added.
While Deputy Public Prosecutor Huo Jiongrui initially did not object, he clarified that there was no legal authority to prevent Liong’s photo from being published.
District Judge Janet Wang agreed, telling the court: “Unfortunately, the risk of embarrassment or public shaming is an inevitable consequence of the accused’s wrongdoing.”
Read the original article at Today Online.
