3 men charged with fraud in alleged connection to movement of Nvidia chips

SINGAPORE: Three men were charged with fraud on Feb 27 (Thursday) following a joint enforcement operation by the Singapore Police Force and Singapore Customs the previous day when police raided 22 locations and seized documentary and electronic records that resulted in the arrest of nine individuals.

The charges against the three men are allegedly connected to a case linked to US chipmaker Nvidia, although this is not mentioned in the police statement to the media. According to The Straits Times, the men are Aaron Woon Guo Jie, 41, and Alan Wei Zhaolun, 49, both Singaporeans, and Li Ming, 51, a Chinese national.

According to the charge sheets, the two Singaporeans have been charged with criminal conspiracy to commit fraud “by fraudulently making a false representation that the items would not be transferred to a person other than the authorised ultimate consignee of end users”.

Li, meanwhile, was charged with committing fraud in 2023 by claiming a firm registered in Singapore called  Luxuriate Your Life Pte Ltd would be the end user of the items.

If the three men are convicted, they could be jailed for up to 20 years, fined, or both fined and jailed.

Reuters reported that no comments have yet been made by DeepSeek, Nvidia, and Luxuriate Your Life, the three companies named in the chips case.

“These offences carry an imprisonment term of up to 20 years, or a fine, or both. Police investigations are ongoing against the other individuals and companies. Customs are also investigating to ascertain if offences under the Customs Act 1960 and the Regulation of Imports & Exports Act 1995 have been committed,” the police said in a statement.

The United States is looking into whether the Chinese AI company DeepSeek had used chips permitted to be shipped to China. The men who were charged may have been involved in the movement of Nvidia’s chips to China.

In January, DeepSeek disrupted the world of AI when it introduced a free assistant that claimed to use less data and was significantly less expensive than AI technology developed in the US. The US announced shortly afterwards that it would look into whether the technology used by DeepSeek also utilized restricted AI chips. A Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the matter said that the US was investigating if the Chinese AI startup had bought semiconductors from tech giant Nvidia through third parties in Singapore to bypass restrictions.

On Feb 1, Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry addressed the matter in a media release, saying the city-state has always upheld the rule of law and reiterating Nvidia’s statement that “there is no reason to believe that DeepSeek obtained any export-controlled products from Singapore”. /TISG

Read also: US investigates if China’s ‘DeepSeek’ sourced Nvidia chips through Singapore intermediaries