Singapore Post (SingPost) staff were caught red-handed trying to fool a small business owner, who had paid a hefty $7,000 for flyer distribution, that they had distributed his flyers when they did not do so.
Local massage parlour owner, 32-year-old Mr Tan, told the Chinese daily that he spent $7,000 on SingPost’s Admail service, which promised to print and distribute flyers advertising his massage parlour to mailboxes in the Sengkang and Punggol areas.
Mr Tan, a Sengkang resident himself, waited patiently for a flyer to arrive in his own mailbox and was left confused when he did not receive one: “SingPost arranged for the flyers to be distributed between 26 November and 4 December. I stay in Sengkang, but after waiting and waiting I didn’t receive any flyer.”
Suspicious when his staff who also live in the area reported that they did not receive flyers as well, Mr Tan emailed SingPost to ask what had happened.
SingPost replied to Mr Tan with multiple pictures as evidence (as pictured above) that the flyers were indeed distributed in the requested regions.
Mr Tan, however, noticed that all the flyers in the “photo evidence” bore the numbers “2709” and a mark on the top right-hand corner of the page: “I checked the photos from SingPost and saw that the same flyer with ‘2709’ and the mark were put in different letterboxes, so obviously that was the same flyer that it was in all the photos.”
Mr Tan lodged a police report against SingPost when they did not reply to his subsequent emails. SingPost subsequently re-opened the investigation and found that there were lapses by staff who dealt with the first investigation.
The postal service company, which is an associate company of Singapore Telecommunications Limited (SingTel), disciplined the staff and rectified the matter thereafter.