STOMPer Christopher wants to warn others about a scam by some youths, who use the name of Temasek Polytechnic to sell paperclips to unsuspecting members of public, after he himself fell prey to the trick.

According to him, a teenager apparoached him three weeks ago at Tiong Bahru MRT station, asking him to buy a heart-shaped paperclip for $2 to help him pass a module in his business course.

He said the teenager told him he and his classmates had to raise $100 in an hour and that there was an examiner watching them from a distance, assessing their marketing skills.

The STOMPer recounted:

"I asked him for his student card to prove that he was from Temasek Polytechnic, but he apologised profusely to me and said in a hurry to leave home in the morning he had forgotten to bring and continued to pester me to buy the paperclip from him because he hadn't had breakfast the whole morning.

"Out of pity, I paid $2 to him and bought the paperclip from him and wish him all the best."

He said he did not suspect anything until he read a letter in the Straits Times on May 24 written by a reader, entitled "Poly's entrepreneurial project business or begging?".

He said he shared the same concerns as the reader, but what shocked him was the reply to the letter from Temasek Polytechnic itself, saying that the teenager that sold the paperclip was not a student of the school.

Realising something was amiss, the STOMPer did his own research on the Internet.

He said:

"I was stunned when I discovered a number of threads on some of Singapore's popular online forums, including STOMP, and realised that this wasn't some school project that the teen was doing to pass his course in order to graduate, but instead he was part of a larger group of teens, working under the umbrella of a notorious MLM company that was recently investigated by the police, who were probably misusing Temasek Polytechnic's name to con the public of money in order to fund their trip to the MLM company's function in Macau.
"I am really aghast and angry that teens today actually have the guts to do something like this in order to con the public of money.

"While $2 from me may seem very little, however, if a lot of people have been conned, the teens would have cheated a large amount of money in the long run.

"Conning the public of money is a serious crime, and what makes it worse is that they actually misuse a school's name in order to achieve their criminal goals.

"It is especially unfair for the school whose name has been misused to face the possibility of having its reputation tarnished for something like this."

STOMP is contacting Temasek Poly and the Police for comment

Entrepreneurship project students not from Temasek Poly

TEMASEK Polytechnic wishes to clarify that none of our students were involved in an entrepreneurship project which required them to 'raise one hundred dollars in five hours' as stated in the online letter,
'Poly's entrepreneurial project business or begging?'

by Ms Shen Xiaoyin (May 24).

Brendan Wong
Director
Corporate Communications Department
Temasek Polytechnic
http://www.straitstimes.com/ST%2BFor...ry_242697.html