SINGAPORE: The guilty plea of a resident of Singapore who had solicited millions of dollars of investors’ money in the United States was announced on Thursday (Feb 22) by US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams.

Fifty-year-old Shamoon Omer Rafiq, also known as Omar Rafiq, had lied to investors in the US, telling them that he was offering shares of stock in privately held companies that had not yet conducted an initial public offering (pre-IPO).

A statement from the US Attorney’s Office said that Rafiq did not have those shares to offer and that he impersonated senior officials of a reputable family office investment firm and engaged in other acts of deception.

“Shamoon Rafiq ran a brazen scheme from Singapore to defraud U.S. investors who wished to invest in well-known private companies before they went public.

This prosecution demonstrates the continued efforts of this Office and our law enforcement partners to pursue those who defraud American investors no matter where the perpetrators are located,” said Mr Williams.

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Rafiq, who was born in and is a citizen of the Netherlands but lived in Singapore, already racked up a prior conviction in 2004 in New York for having carried out a fraud scheme in which he purported to sell pre-IPO stock for a privately held company.

He did not own or have access to this stock. He was given and served a jail sentence of 41 weeks in the US, and after he was released, Rafiq later relocated to Singapore.

Sometime around 2020, while he was in Singapore, he embarked on another scheme to defraud victims into paying millions of dollars to him for alleged investment interests in various pre-IPO stocks that he neither possessed nor owned.

To achieve this, in July 2020, he impersonated two senior officials from a well-known family office investment firm, FamCap, which manages and invests the assets of members of a prominent billionaire family.

Rafiq even created a fake FamCap website and email addresses for the two officials that closely resemble their actual email addresses.

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In the same month, he started to solicit millions of dollars from investment companies in New York and other areas based on false claims that in exchange for their funds, he would sell them investment interests in a purported special purpose investment vehicle that he said was managed by FamCap.

In one case, a client of an investment company in New York wired Rafik US$9 million (S$12.1 million).

He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to commit securities fraud and wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

Furthermore, the Singapore resident has agreed to pay restitution and forfeiture of over US$1 million (S$1.3 million) in connection with his guilty plea. /TISG

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