This is an AI-generated image. Any likeness to any real person is unintended.
Fake IPAs are becoming sickeningly common, with workers losing thousands of dollars in scams. “IPA” stands for In-Principle Approval for a Work Permit. The real thing would be a document issued in PDF format by the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) signalling their approval for an employer’s application to hire a foreign worker. Naturally, if the worker is not yet in Singapore, it also means that the employer can begin to make arrangements to fly him in, provided some additional preliminary steps are taken.
However, the IPA document – when forged – has become an easy way to scam prospective migrant workers. We will argue here that MOM urgently needs to do away with its PDF version of it, and replace it with a more secure, interactive web version.
How these scams work
Forged-IPA scams generally piggyback on the practice of prospective workers having to pay their fixers for jobs as soon as a job is confirmed, with the IPA recognised as confirmation. The key stages in getting a job are these, and scams take deceptively similar steps too.
1. A prospective worker, who is almost always someone outside Singapore at that point in time, asks a fixer to find a job for him. The fixer is typically someone in the worker’s home country, speaking the worker’s native language, but almost always has no licence to act as an agent. He is usually recommended to the worker by the worker’s friends or relatives (since the worker has no other contacts).
2. The fixer asks for the worker’s passport details and the worker provides them.
3. Whereas a genuine fixer would pass the passport details on to a genuine employer so that the employer can apply for an IPA for the worker, a scam fixer would simply forge an IPA in PDF format using the passport details.
What’s a fixer?
We use the word “fixer” to mean someone who gets a job for a job-seeker. The word “agent” is more commonly used, but it is prone to confusion because it tends to imply a party with an employment agency licence. Fixers span both the ones with a licence (either registered in the home country, or less commonly, in Singapore) as well as those without. In TWC2’s casework, we see more cases of unlicensed fixers than licensed employment agencies.
4. If the fixer has found a real job for the worker, the fixer would receive the IPA from the employer and then forward that IPA to the worker. If it’s a scam, the fixer would show the worker a fake IPA that (mostly likely) he himself generated. Few workers, unfamiliar with Singapore documents, would be able to spot a fake.
5. Since the practice has developed that “agent money” has to be paid up as soon as a job is confirmed (even before the worker travels to Singapore), payment has to be made upon receipt of an IPA. As described in many previous articles on this site, amounts can be $10,000 or $12,000 for first-time workers, sometimes much more than that.
Workers expect to receive a flight ticket soon after the IPA is issued. But when no flight ticket materialises and the fixer becomes uncontactable, a worker would begin to fear that the IPA was fake. Some of them reach TWC2 for help, but it is often too late. They had paid huge sums of money by then. TWC2 has seen several cases over the years, but 2024 was unusual in that we saw more of them than before. Below, we will discuss two examples that we came across over the past two months.
MOM’s Check a Work Pass option
MOM offers a simple online enquiry window that allows a worker to check if there is a valid IPA (or Work Permit) in his name. The worker needs only to key in his date of birth and either his passport number or FIN number. If the system says “No record found”, then there is no genuine IPA or Work Permit in MOM’s system.
However, few prospective workers in origin countries know about this enquiry window on MOM’s website. Even if they were lucky enough to find out about it and used it to check if the IPA document handed to them was genuine, they would have paid the thousands of dollars anyway. Fixers typically demand immediate payment once an IPA is handed over.
The solution should be to eliminate the PDF version of the IPA altogether. That way, there is no document to forge. We will discuss this in more detail further down.
Two recent cases are described in this story. They differ in important ways. One was an instance where the salary figure in the real IPA was altered while the other was a complete forgery. Both were intended to deceive.
First example
The first example is imaged below. It shows an IPA for a job with Elohim Construction with a basic salary of $702 per month. It is very hard to tell from a glance that it was a forgery.
The doctored IPA given to the first worker
However, the forger made a clumsy mistake. The embassy-attested version given to the worker looked different from the first (already doctored) IPA. Anyone would naturally wonder why the two versions looked different.
The attested IPA given to the first worker
The next set of close-ups will show the difference more clearly. On the left is the IPA with the doctored salary. It is really hard to tell that the figure of “702” was an illegitimate change because the font and placement looks very much like a real IPA – an example of which (from a different worker) is shown on the right-side image with a blue border. This shows how expert forgers have become.
Close-ups for comparison
The embassy-stamped copy, on the other hand, had a clumsy alteration. What likely happened was that the fixer brought the real IPA to the embassy for attestation, but couldn’t send that attested IPA to the worker, since it would show a different salary. So, post-attestation, the fixer made a cut-and-paste into a scanned or photographed image of the attested IPA.
After the worker’s suspicions were aroused, he learned about MOM’s Check a Work Pass system, and went there to check. He discovered to his horror that the basic salary was actually $429 per month. The screenshot of this search result is imaged below. So, in this case, there really was an IPA waiting for him, but the document sent to him (as well as the embassy-attested version) had been doctored.
Embassy attestation
The Bangladeshi government, in trying to prevent their citizens falling victim to non-existent jobs abroad, set up a system whereby employers or their agents in the destination country had to get their IPAs attested before these IPAs could be used to process the exit of the worker from Bangladesh. That way, the diplomatic mission could help ensure that a real job exists.
Why would a fixer alter the salary? One possibility was perhaps because the worker had said he would not accept any job below $700 a month; another possibility was so that the fixer could justify a higher fee on the basis of a higher salary.
The image below is what the worker and TWC2 found when we went into Check a Work Pass. The basic monthly salary was stated as $429, not $702.
The result obtained from MOM’s Check a Work Pass
Interestingly, Elohim Construction Services was mentioned in an earlier story on this website from about a year ago, “You are playing with my life”. Already, from that earlier story, we can see that there was something extremely suspicious about Elohim, including the fact that that other worker had to pay money to a Singapore bank account – therefore it should have been under Singapore jurisdiction. Yet, a year on, we see the name Elohim involved in another scam.
Second example
The second example is of an outright forgery of an IPA when no true version existed at all. The image below is of the totally fake IPA given to the worker by his fixer:
Fake IPA given to the second worker
We had our suspicions when we noticed that the job was in the “Garden sector”. There is no such sector in the way MOM classifies work permit jobs. Then when we did a query with the ACRA site, we found that the company supposedly the employer, Khai Seng Garden Pte Ltd, did not exist at all.
MOM would never process an IPA application from a fictitious company. This document that the worker received from his fixer cannot possibly be genuine.
Our conclusion was confirmed through an enquiry at MOM’s Check a Work Pass page. It gave a “No record found” response, indicating that there was no IPA at all for this worker.
Result from MOM’s Check a Work Pass, in the case of the victim in the second example
In this second example, there was no copy of an embassy-attested IPA. But attestation is not necessary for the scam to succeed. Once the fixer has gotten his fee upon passing the IPA (in this case, a false one) to the worker, the fixer can simply disappear and be uncontactable.
An easy solution
Clearly, MOM’s practice of generating an IPA in PDF format is a vulnerability. Too many fixers now have the skills to doctor or create an entirely fake PDF document. This is why we urge the discontinuation of PDF format for IPAs.
The alternative is right before our eyes. The query page on MOM’s website (Check a Work Pass) already contains some key details parallelling the details in the IPA. See the image below for example. In this case, a worker (a different guy from the above two examples) had a genuine IPA and the search on MOM’s Check a Work Pass not only confirms it to be so but also provides a few salary details.
Result from MOM’s Check a Work Pass not only confirms that there is an IPA waiting for the worker but also provides a few salary details
Why not expand this response to the query to include all the details currently shown on the PDF IPA? Doing so will make the PDF version redundant.
Once this change is made, genuine employers and agents can simply tell the prospective worker to go online to <https://service2.mom.gov.sg/workpass/enquiry/prelanding> and see for himself that the job (and its details) is ready for him. Naturally, workers should also be told to make sure the domain name they are visiting is “mom.gov.sg” and nothing else.
Even so, forgery is possible. However, instead of merely creating a fake PDF document, the forger will have to code a false webpage and hope that workers will be careless and fail to check the domain name. For workers already in Singapore and going for a transfer, a SingPass gate control can be built in for security.
Especially as an easy remedy is available, all the more the PDF format for IPAs should be discontinued without delay.
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