Court strikes elderly scam victim's $500k UOB claim over evidence concealment

Lao Iok Sim opened a savings account at UOB's People's Park Complex branch on a June morning in 2022, unaware that the decision would cost her half a million dollars and, years later, her right to seek compensation in court. Within days of setting up internet banking, she deposited $600,000 into the account. Then, between June 17 and 20, ten transfers totalling $500,000 left the account through the mobile app, each one authorized with her digital token. The bank sent her ten SMS alerts. She ignored all of them.

What Lao did not tell the court, when she sued UOB in 2026, was how those transfers had actually happened. According to her police report—filed months earlier but kept from her own legal claim—a person claiming to be a Chinese police officer had instructed her to open the account and provide her banking credentials. She was told not to check her accounts. She complied. Only after Singapore Police contacted her did she realize she had been scammed. But in her statement of claim against the bank, she said something entirely different: that she had never activated mobile banking, never intended to transfer money, and had no knowledge of the withdrawals. Two irreconcilable versions of the same events.

Assistant Registrar Ramu Miyapan, reviewing the case in August 2026, found himself examining not the merits of whether UOB should have stopped the transfers, but the conduct of the woman bringing the claim. The police report existed. UOB had received a copy in June 2022. Yet when Lao's lawyers filed her statement of claim years later, the most damaging facts—the ones that would undermine her case against the bank—were simply absent. When UOB eventually demanded the full police report, Lao produced a selectively redacted version. She never explained which parts she had removed or why. The silence, the judge concluded, was itself an answer.

The assistant registrar acknowledged the weight of what he was deciding. Lao was elderly, spoke no English, and had already lost a substantial sum to fraud. But he found that her conduct amounted to a deliberate suppression of material evidence and an abuse of the court process. It was not a procedural slip or a misunderstanding. Her lawyers would have known the contents of the police report. The omission from her statement of claim was, in his words, "a deliberate attempt by the claimant to present to the court only the most favourable version of events." The pattern of concealment—the initial resistance to producing the report, the selective redactions, the refusal to explain them—depicted, he wrote, "a constant pattern of behaviour that was designed to keep the truth from rearing its head in court."

On August 18, 2026, the High Court struck out her entire claim. The $500,000 she had lost to the scammer would not be recovered from UOB. Instead, she was ordered to pay the bank $12,500 in legal costs. The judge was explicit about his reasoning: allowing the case to proceed would undermine the integrity of the legal system itself. The interests of justice, he wrote, cannot be served by permitting a claim to continue when the claimant has demonstrated a willingness to present contradictory accounts and actively withhold material evidence. Vulnerability, however genuine, could not outweigh the seriousness of that conduct.

Lao has appealed the decision. The case now sits in a peculiar space—a victim of fraud whose attempt to hold a financial institution accountable has been foreclosed not because her underlying claim lacked merit, but because of how she chose to present it. The court never determined whether a reasonably prudent banker would have allowed the transfers. It never reached the substance of her complaint. Instead, it found that the woman herself had violated the very process designed to resolve her dispute fairly.