Singapore — A renovation contractor, who had been jailed before for having sex with a 16-year-old in 2017, has been jailed again for having sex with another underage girl he met last year.
Andy Kow Yong Wen, a contractor, was handed a 15-month jail sentence on Tuesday (Dec 14) for attempting to have a sexual relationship with the girl, who was then also 16 when they met.
He had pleaded guilty to one count of commercial sex with a minor under 18 as well as one count of attempted commercial sex with the same victim. Another count of possessing obscene films was considered in his sentencing.
Kow had placed a number of online ads on the Locanto app, which offers a classified ads service, and the girl responded as she wanted part-time work to supplement her allowance.
His ads had offered as much as $1,000 for an unspecified job to girls from local junior colleges or Institute Technical Education students.
She told Kow she was 16, and he pretended he was only 30.
When they got together, he asked her if she’d had sex before, and if she was open to it. She said she had not but was open to “anything”. She also told him she expected an allowance of between $50 and $100.
They arranged to meet on March 18, and Kow picked her up at the carpark of Newton Food Centre, then parked the car so he could fondle her and kiss her.
He took her to Holland Road, where he was overseeing the renovation of a unit, and she performed oral sex on him.
After he took her home, he promised to give her money and added that they would have sex the next day at a hotel.
But when he messaged her via the Telegram app that he would pick her up the next day at 5 pm to have sex, her mother saw the message, called Kow and confronted him.
She later told her daughter’s school about Kow’s relations with her daughter, and the teenager also spoke to her counsellor about it on March 19.
When she told Kow that the school knew about the relationship, he told her to lie about his having promised to give her money.
The teen then blocked him on Telegram.
He persisted and used another account to ask her to be friends with benefits, offering to be her driver and to give her $400 a week. In fact, she never received any money from him.
He had also asked her to give him selfies so that he would be “less lonely”. She was able to screenshot his messages to her.
The court learned that in 2017, Kow made overtures to another 16-year-old who had advertised her sexual services on Locanto. They had sex, he asked for nude photos and gave her $500.
For this, he was jailed for three months in 2019.
In the more recent case, the prosecution sought a jail term of between 19 and 25 months.
Kow’s lawyer, Justin Ng, countered that his client should only be jailed for nine months. He said Kow’s father had died when he was only 10, and he grew up without much supervision, but was “not beyond redemption or hope”. He said Kow had been jailed for drug offences when he was in his younger years but had turned his life around after being released at 35.
The lawyer claimed that Kow’s “childhood attachment issues remained unaddressed”, and was manifested in his addiction to meeting girls online, for which he is now seeking help. /TISG
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