Raymond Ng, the husband of anti-vaccination personality Iris Koh, held an online course about cryptocurrency on Thursday night (Feb 24) titled “Is Our Money Safe From Government?”
Koh is currently facing two charges. One is for conspiring with a doctor to defraud the Health Ministry by having certain people certified to have received the Sinopharm vaccinations when they had not, and the other is for obstructing a police inspector from discharging her duties. She allegedly tore up a printed copy of her statement on Jan 25 at the Police Cantonment Complex.
On Feb 8, she started a fundraising campaign for $100,000 to help pay for her legal costs and was allegedly able to raise this amount in less than two weeks.
On Feb 23, she announced that she was giving her husband’s course on cryptocurrency for free to all her donors as a show of gratitude for their support.
The course, she wrote in a post on Healing the Divide’s Telegram channel, was worth $200, but she was giving it to her supporters “no matter how much you gave to the fund, even $2.40.”
She then went on to write, “We want everyone to keep their money safe from government control. We believe that until we can protect our money, we can’t really have freedom.”
Last month, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) warned that trading cryptocurrency is risky and not suitable for the public, causing a shutdown of crypto ATMs in the country.
“The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has consistently warned the public that the trading of digital payment tokens (“DPTs” or commonly referred to as cryptocurrencies) is highly risky and not suitable for the general public. The public should not be encouraged to engage in the trading of DPTs)” MAS said on Jan 17.
In another Telegram post, Mr Ng wrote that there had been a lot of questions about his wife’s fundraising.
“The fact of the matter is, about 100k SGD has been given to Iris for her criminal proceedings.
So now the question is how to store it.”
The answer, the couple seems to believe, lies in the cryptocurrency route.
And while the money could be put in a bank account, “we are not sure whether due process would be skipped to freeze the money and we cannot use it,” he added.
What prompted the course to seem to be recent events in Canada also involving anti-vaxxers.
Mr Ng had written in a Feb 22 post that Canada had frozen the accounts of the truckers who joined the large-scale and disruptive protests in Ottawa against Covid-19 vaccines “when they are not convicted of any crimes yet.”
“Are you concerned that other governments may do the same thing to their own citizens – to seize their financial assets without due process?…
How can you use blockchain to secure your financial and economic well-being?
Would the government be extending its control to other areas of our lives? Like limiting our access to banking?”
But here’s a fact-check for the anti-vaxxer couple and their followers. News reports say Canada began lifting the freeze on the protesters’ bank accounts last Monday, Feb 21.
And while Healing the Divide claims to be made up of “intelligent vaxxers,” the Ministry of Health issued public warnings about the group, since November last year.
The ministry said the group “adopts an anti-vaccination stance and claims to warn people about the dangers of vaccination,” calling them out for falsehoods regarding Covid-19. /TISG
Healing the Divide’s Iris Koh claims she’s raised over $96,000 to help with legal fees