Man With Primary School Qualification Earns $6k A Month Using Fake Degree

There’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to the type of employee companies are looking to hire as it varies from industry to industry. However, someone with a degree is often going to have the upper hand over the person who doesn’t have it.

With that in mind, Chin Ming Lik decided to create his own fate. The 49-year-old man skipped all the steps into having a great career and chose to forge his way to success in his own crooked way.

Chin only had a primary school qualification, but he didn’t let that get in the way. In fact, he easily hopped from company to company for the past several years, earning a lucrative salary.

No, it wasn’t because of his amazing skills that he got to earn even as much as SGD 9,000.00 (approx USD 6,640.00) a month at one time. The truth is that Chin had been faking his documents to qualify for higher positions.

As early as 2014, Chin was already forging fake documents. It all started when he learned that civil engineering is a profitable career, he used two certificates that belonged to other people from previous jobs and filled in his details.

On his resume, Chin claimed that he had 16 years of experience and had previously worked for construction companies in Singapore.

If employers would request for original documents, Chin already had a ready response. He declared that he misplaced a lot of his original documents when he moved houses.

Since Chin didn’t really know anything about civil engineering, he would hop from company to company before the people around him would suspect anything. He worked at 38 companies from 2013 to 2017. He never stayed in one company for over three months.

His lies finally caught up to him when a company notified the police after his documents were not found on the NUS degree scroll database.

Police stopped Chin on April 2017 at Woodlands Checkpoint. He pleaded guilty for forging the documents. During the investigation, it was discovered that Chin had been driving without a valid license for a decade. He also shoplifted while out on bail back in 2017.

His defense lawyer said that Chin was “deeply remorseful for his actions.” He was sentenced to two years and 11 months in jail. He was also fined SGD 1,600.00 (approx. USD 1,180.00).