A woman has been jailed in Singapore over a dating scam that used fake profiles on dating apps to lure victims into rigged mahjong games, a scheme prosecutors say won 99 per cent of the time and generated more than S$100,000.
Olivia Chin Hui Zhen was part of a group that arranged 28 games involving at least 28 victims between April and June 2024, of which 19 proceeded. The scheme worked in two stages: first, fake profiles on dating apps such as OkCupid and Tinder were used to befriend men and build rapport; then the victims were invited to friendly mahjong sessions that were anything but friendly. The games were rigged, and prosecutors said the group’s ringleader, Ang, estimated that the arrangement allowed them to win 99 per cent of the time. Total earnings from the sessions were estimated at more than S$100,000.
Chin participated in 10 of the 19 sessions and earned between S$100 and S$400 per game. In one case, a victim was told he owed S$26,000 after losing but refused to pay — a sign of how aggressively the group pressed its marks. Chin’s lawyers argued that she had lower culpability, joined the group late and made full restitution for the games in which she participated. Prosecutors countered that she acted as both a host and a player and sometimes pressured victims by pretending to contribute toward their losses. District Judge Chay Yuen Fatt said Chin was not a passive participant and that her role and culpability could not be understated, while taking her restitution into account when passing sentence.
The case shows how online impersonation can be combined with carefully planned offline deception to create substantial financial losses. For Singaporeans, it highlights the risks of accepting money-related invitations from people first encountered through dating apps — a warning that extends beyond romance scams into hybrid schemes that blend social engineering with old-fashioned cheating at the mahjong table.
Mahjong occupies a special place in Singaporean social life: a game of skill, luck and reading people, played in living rooms and void decks across the island. Rigging it — through stacked tiles, signalling between confederates or other sleights — turns a beloved pastime into a weapon. Victims, already emotionally invested through the dating-app courtship, would have found it psychologically difficult to walk away from a table where they were steadily losing to people they believed were friends or romantic prospects.
The jailing closes one chapter of a case first reported by The Straits Times and CNA, but the broader phenomenon persists. As dating apps remain central to how Singaporeans meet, scammers continue to innovate, pairing digital personas with real-world traps. The court’s message in Chin’s case was unambiguous: playing a supporting role in a rigged game is still cheating, and restitution after the fact does not erase culpability.