He Faked an $11 Million Sale. The Agent Who Signed for It Is Still Paying It Back

In June 2022, a property agent asked a woman he had known for ten years to co-broke a deal with him.

The unit was in Prudential Tower at 30 Cecil Street, worth around $11 million. She was 38, and as CNA reported, she was recovering from injuries from an accident and had never handled a sale of that size. He told her he needed money urgently and could not submit the advance-commission request himself. He would prepare the documents; she only had to submit them. Her cut would be $5,000, and he would cover her Medisave and income tax on it.

She is named in court papers only as A1. She believed, the prosecution said, that he was extending her a genuine opportunity.

The signatures on the option to purchase and the seller's commission agreement were forged. There was no buyer. The unit was never sold.

This is the part worth slowing down on, because nothing about it is exotic.

Agents are paid late. A deal closes, the seller pays the agency, the agency pays the agent — and weeks pass. LytePay, a payment institution licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, exists to close that gap: it advances an agent their commission for a processing fee. The agent submits the sale documents, LytePay pays out. When the seller's commission reaches the agency, the agency deducts what the agent already took and repays LytePay the remainder.

It is ordinary working-capital finance, and for an agent between closings it is genuinely useful.

It also has one structural feature that this case turns on entirely. The advance is released against documents, and the obligation to repay attaches to whoever submitted them. Not to whoever ends up with the cash.

On the forged Prudential Tower sale, LytePay released $91,653 to A1. She took her share and transferred about $83,554 to Cheong En Kiong, who used it to pay down his debts. He had been an undischarged bankrupt since 2019.

About six months later, ERA noticed that the buyer of an $11 million unit had never paid its commission. An internal investigation found the fraud. The agency issued Cheong a warning.

A warning was not enough. Per the reporting, he went on to rope a second agent — a 63-year-old with OrangeTee & Tie, named B4 in court documents, who was being treated for prostate cancer — into co-broking a false sale of another Prudential Tower unit in July 2025. Told about Cheong's financial troubles, he agreed to help.

Then in October 2025 Cheong visited a 69-year-old former client, told him there was a buyer for his commercial unit in Lucky Plaza, and asked for a signature to exercise the option. The man signed blank documents. B4 co-broked that one too, believing it real. LytePay released $7,955; B4 passed $4,700 to Cheong.

It unravelled the same way it had the first time. OrangeTee wrote to the supposed buyer of the Prudential Tower unit about roughly $135,000 in outstanding agency fees. The buyer replied that there had been no such deal.

Not the man who took the money.

ERA asked both Cheong and A1 to repay the full $91,653. Cheong has paid back only $10,000 to $12,000. A1 has borne the remainder. LytePay issued her a statutory demand and has been deducting her commissions from other, genuine sales to claw the balance back. She has asked him to repay her more than once, the prosecutor said, without result.

B4 was fired by OrangeTee and made to bear $86,014 in advances. He has received no restitution either.

So the ledger reads: one agent recovering from an accident, repaying a debt out of every real sale she closes. One agent with cancer, dismissed and carrying $86,014. Mothership, which reported the court documents in detail, puts the total defrauded above $100,000 while noting the true figure is unclear.

Cheong has been remanded since April 2026. Prosecutors sought 24.5 to 28 months' jail, citing repeated offending and the substantial obligations left with his victims; his lawyer asked for 18.5 to 21.5 months, citing an immediate guilty plea. Sentencing was adjourned to October 2026. He no longer appears on CEA's public register.

The question the case leaves hanging is why two experienced agents said yes to paperwork they had not seen prepared. Part of the answer is friendship. Part of it is what the roster looks like underneath.

We hold the CEA salesperson roster in our agent directory — 38,217 people — with the transactions we have recorded against each over the trailing three years. The distribution is not a bell curve:

Almost a third of the roster has no transaction recorded with us in three years, and 46.1% sit below the three-deals-in-three-years bar CEA now uses at renewal. At the other end, 17.8% did 25 or more.

Be careful what that means: it is a measure of activity, not income, and a deal we have not captured makes someone look quieter than they are — so read it as an upper bound. But the shape is the point. This is an industry with a very large quiet tail, where a single co-broking cut on someone else's big-ticket deal is a real opportunity, and where a friend's urgent request is the kind of thing you say yes to.

Strip the fraud away and one design feature is left standing.

Advance commission is released against submitted documents. When the sale turns out not to exist, the money is clawed back from the account it went into — which is the co-broker's, not the person who engineered it. A1 and B4 had no way to verify a signature they never saw signed, and every incentive to trust the colleague who handed them the file.

That is not a criticism of advance-commission finance, which is legitimate, regulated and useful. It is an observation about where the check sits. In both episodes the fraud was caught by an agency noticing an unpaid commission months later — not at the point of submission, and not by the agent whose account carried the risk.

It is also striking how long the gap was. The first fraud was submitted in June 2022 and surfaced about six months on. A warning followed, and he offended again in 2025 — twice. The detection worked, eventually. It just worked far downstream of the person who ended up paying.

We should be careful not to let a vivid story do more work than it can carry.

This is one prosecution, and he has not been sentenced. Cheong pleaded guilty on 8 September 2026; sentencing is set for October. Other charges are still to be taken into account. Nothing here establishes a pattern across the industry, and the overwhelming majority of co-broking arrangements are exactly what they appear to be.

Our roster table is context, not causation. We are not suggesting A1 or B4 were among the agents with few recorded transactions — we have no idea, and we would not publish it if we did. The distribution describes the industry they work in, nothing more. It is also our transaction record rather than CEA's, it is a trailing three calendar years rather than anyone's own registration cycle, and it counts a room rental the same as a landed sale. All of which is why the below-bar figure is an upper bound.

And falling below the bar is not losing a licence. Agents can sit a refresher examination instead, newly registered agents get their first year free, and CEA has said waivers may be granted case by case.

It is a facility that pays an agent their expected commission early, for a fee, instead of making them wait for the agency's payment cycle to complete. LytePay, the provider in this case, is licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore as a payment institution.

The flow is straightforward: the agent submits the sale documents, the provider advances the commission, and when the seller's commission reaches the agency, the agency deducts what was already advanced and repays the provider the balance.

The facility itself is legitimate and was not the wrongdoing here. What the case exposes is that the advance is underwritten by documents and by the submitting agent's obligation to repay — so a forged file turns an ordinary cash-flow product into an unsecured debt in someone else's name.

Both were left carrying the money. A1 repaid the balance of a $91,653 advance out of commissions on her genuine sales, after a statutory demand from LytePay. B4 was dismissed by his agency and made to bear $86,014. Neither has been made whole by the man who took the cash.

We are not in a position to tell you what your own legal exposure would be — that depends on your agency agreement, the facility's terms and facts we cannot see, and it is a question for your agency and your own lawyer, not for us. What this case does illustrate plainly is where the practical burden landed: on the person whose name was on the submission.

The unglamorous takeaway is that the documents you submit are yours. A file handed to you fully prepared by someone else, on a deal you did not source, with an urgent reason why they cannot submit it themselves, is the exact shape of what happened twice here.

Through CEA's public register, which lists every registered salesperson and the agency they are registered with. It is the single check worth doing before you sign anything or hand over money, and it is free.

It is also a live record rather than an archive: as CNA noted, Cheong was no longer listed on the register as of 8 September 2026, the day he pleaded guilty.

One limitation worth knowing — the register tells you someone is registered today. It is not a performance history and not a complaints file, so pair it with what you can see of an agent's actual transaction record.

The case facts — the charges, the guilty plea, the two agencies, the amounts, the victims' circumstances and the sentencing submissions — come from CNA's report of 8 September 2026 and Mothership's account of the court documents, both linked below. We did not attend the hearing and have not seen the court documents ourselves. Victims are identified only as A1, B1 and B4, as they are in the reporting.

The roster distribution is PropKaki's own, from our agent directory: 38,217 CEA salespersons, with transactions counted over the trailing three calendar years as at 11 August 2026. It is an aggregate distribution only — no individual agent is identified and no earnings are shown, which is a standing rule here. The figures are our transaction record, not CEA's.

No part of the roster analysis relates to the individuals in this case, and we make no claim about their activity levels.

• Bankrupt property agent admits to faking sales to get advance commissions — CNA, 8 September 2026. The charges, the LytePay mechanism, the Prudential Tower and Lucky Plaza episodes and the sentencing submissions.
• Bankrupt S'pore property agent, 51, fakes sales & dupes fellow agents to get advance commission payouts of up to S$91,600 — Mothership, 9 September 2026. Court-document detail on the co-brokers, the amounts borne and the aftermath.
• PropKaki — CEA salesperson roster in our agent directory, transactions over the trailing three years. As of 11 August 2026.

This is opinion and analysis from the PropKaki Editorial Desk, not legal or financial advice. The case reporting belongs to CNA and Mothership; the roster analysis and the conclusions drawn from it are ours.

Cheong En Kiong has pleaded guilty but has not been sentenced, and further charges are to be taken into account at sentencing in October 2026. Nothing here should be read as a finding about any agent other than him, or as a comment on LytePay, ERA or OrangeTee & Tie, none of which is accused of wrongdoing — in both episodes it was agency checks that surfaced the fraud.

If you are an agent who has been asked to submit documents on a deal you did not source, that is a conversation for your agency's compliance team before it is anything else.