Former payroll manager, Ho Kai Xin, has been sentenced to nine years and 11 months in prison for stealing $4.2 million from Bybit.
According to Singaporean news outlet the Strait Times, the 32-year-old woman pleaded guilty to five charges of cheating, eight counts of benefiting from criminal conduct, and one count of providing false information to a public servant. As many as 30 other charges were considered during her court hearing before she was sentenced.
The prosecution said Ho has been using 5.7 million SGD ($4.2 million) worth of crypto funds she stole from Bybit Fintech to “live a lavish lifestyle” since June 2022. Court documents state from Oct. 20, 2021, to Oct 6, 2022 Ho manipulated Microsoft Excel spreadsheets when she worked as an outsourced payroll manager for the crypto firm, carrying out payments for around 900 Bybit employees.
In late January, Ho had already received a six-week jail sentence for disobeying court orders when she spent around 840,000 SGD ($627,633) from the stolen funds on a penthouse and luxury goods after she was ordered by a civil court not to use those funds.
Ho will begin serving her longer sentence after she finishes her six weeks in prison.
How Ho Kai Xin stole $4.2m from Bybit
Deputy Public Prosecutor Jeremy Bin said Ho used the funds she stole from the crypto exchange to buy luxury items such as sunglasses, bags, shoes, shirts and rings from Louis Vuitton. She also placed a down payment of around 750,000 SGD ($560,388) for a penthouse worth over 3.7 million SGD ($2.7 million).
The first time Ho committed theft was in May 2022 when she stole more than 117,000 SGD ($87,417) from Wechain, the company enlisted to handle payrolls for Bybit employees. She manipulated Microsoft Excel files to ensure the funds were transferred to her bank accounts instead of the firm’s.
“When her actions went undetected, the accused became emboldened, going on a cheating spree to drain her client company, ByBit,” said Bin.
Ho owned six bank accounts and four electronic wallets on four different crypto platforms. She would alter Excel spreadsheet rows for payments owed by the crypto firm in USDT (USDT) so that the funds would be sent to her wallet address instead of the wallets of Bybit employees.
Ho would then convert the stolen crypto funds into fiat currency. From May 31 to Aug 31, 2022, Bybit made eight cryptocurrency transfers to Ho’s four wallets, amounting to more than 4.2 million USDT.
After she cheated the company into transferring around $4.3 million worth of crypto into her wallets, she laundered a large portion of the stolen funds so that they would be untraceable.
Her crimes were discovered in September 2022, when a Wechain finance director noticed unusually large crypto transfers in the spreadsheet. After internal investigations concluded, a Wechain representative reported Ho to the police in February 2023. She was arrested two months later.
