“Come to my shop at 5pm. Bring 5 lakh.” (This is an AI-generated image)

Our article “Management executives washing dishes“, published on 10 May 2025, caught the attention of the media. Channel NewsAsia published their story on 5 June 2025 (“MOM investigating allegations of companies misusing passes for hiring foreign students, trainees“) basically reporting what we had said in our article and that the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) was investigating the reported abuses.

We ourselves knew that MOM was investigating because a few weeks earlier and soon after we published our article on this website, MOM had contacted us directly regarding the issue.

The Straits Times also did a story on the matter. “MOM investigating alleged misuse of work passes meant for foreign students and trainees” was published the day after Channel NewsAsia’s story, on 6 June 2025. The Straits Times carried comments by TWC2’s Executive Director Ethan Guo on the wider significance of the abuses. However, the Straits Times is behind a paywall and so it may be helpful if we quoted key excerpts from their story here:

Investigations are under way into what a support group for migrant workers brands a “job scam” centred on misuse of work passes.

Training Employment Passes give foreign students and intra-corporate trainees the right to work here for three months, but they have allegedly been used to employ foreign workers in lower-skilled roles not allowed under the pass.

Some of the probes surrounding breaches of the pass requirements have already been completed, with more to come, noted the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) on June 6. It did not disclose how many reports it had received.

Further down,

TWC2 executive director Ethan Guo told The Straits Times that a common feature was that most of the workers were coming to work for the first time in Singapore and had arrived relatively recently.

“This showed that these were young, impressionable and vulnerable foreigners with little or no knowledge of employment laws in Singapore,” Mr Guo noted.

He added that the group could not confirm if there has been a sudden uptick in the number of TEP holders reporting salary irregularities.

“What has happened of late was a concerted effort by TWC2 to educate migrant workers on the correct payment of their salaries, and this could have resulted in more workers with such problems coming forward to seek help from us,” he said.

There may have been many more victims in the past who did not realise they have been scammed, or did not have an avenue for assistance.

We would stress that it’s not enough to merely see this issue as one where agents and employers are running rings around MOM’s regulatory system and taking advantage of gaps. There are real victims: workers who have received false or misleading promises about the nature and duration of their jobs and, as a result of those false promises, have found themselves in legal jeopardy after starting work. Those coming to TWC2 for help have also not been properly paid.

Quoting further from Straits Times’ story,

Mr Guo said TWC2’s concern lies with workers who have been misled into jobs they paid huge sums to agents for and then put into “legal jeopardy once they agree”.

Ethan also pointed out that merely going after the agents and employers isn’t good enough. There is a bigger problem – of manpower needs – that gave rise to this abuse in the first place and it needs to be addressed.

He noted that the attempts to dodge the TEP requirements may have arisen as a work-around for industries “desperate for cheap foreign labour”.

“A more holistic response would be a review of work permit quotas for these industry sectors like logistics, cleaning and food and beverage.”

But Mr Guo added that TWC2 is not advocating a massive liberalisation in foreign workforce policy, as making cheap labour too easily available could blunt the incentive for employers to pursue automation and productivity improvements.

A much bigger problem than our 13 cases suggested

Immediately after the issue appeared in the media, TWC2 was contacted by a few other parties offering us more information. Through conversations with them, we learned that the issue was much bigger than it had seemed to us. As reported in our original post, we saw 13 male workers in the space of a few months with Training Employment Passes but whose actual jobs and compensation were not aligned with these passes. The number (13) caught our attention because we hardly ever saw workers with Training Employment Passes in years past, and clearly this was a new and troubling trend – thus our initial story on this website.

What we learned from these subsequent conversations painted a different and more serious picture. We were told that the misuse of Training Employment Passes began about two to three years ago, at first on a small scale, but by late 2024, “nearly all employment agents” (to quote an informant) were offering employers such workers. Here is a short video an employment agent circulated over TikTok advertising the advantages of the hiring workers through the Training Employment Pass scheme:

We’re also told that the employment agents were advising prospective employers that there was no need to pay the legal minimum monthly salary of $3,000 for this type of work pass. Something like $2,000 would do – they reportedly said. What this suggests is that the 13 workers who came to TWC2 for help over salaries constituted the tiniest tip of the iceberg in terms of the number of workers who were shortchanged.

While no one (outside of MOM) has a count of the numbers involved, our informant’s sense is that in the past year at least, hundreds (if not more) of Training Employment Passes have been issued on an illegitimate basis.

Advertised on Youtube

Corroborating the above estimate of “hundreds” coming into Singapore through illegimate use of the Training Employment Pass route, we found a Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@Travel_guru007/videos) by someone with the handle “Travel Guru” or “@travel_guru007”. He advertises his services getting “all types” of visa” for entering Singapore. As of 16 June 2025, his channel has 1.88K subscribers, and contains 211 videos, all or mostly all in Hindi. A quick glance shows that many of his videos are by the work candidates he successfully sent to Singapore on Training Employment Passes.

Of course, his video channel may be taken offline anytime, once the authorities get onto his tail.

Interestingly, he also says in his video channel description that he can also arrange “Malasiya visit to work”, which brings us to the next section.

Singapore becoming a node for people “smuggling”

And there’s more!

We also heard that the ease by which Training Employment Passes could be obtained led to it becoming a backdoor for Bangladeshi workers to enter Malaysia. It’s a completely different operating model from what we at TWC2 saw. We saw workers who were made to work horrific hours in Singapore and paid less than the documented amount, while being misled about the possible duration of employment.

What we heard from this other informant was that one or more agents are bringing Bangladeshi workers into Singapore on Training Employment Passes but are not even put to work in Singapore. We have the name of one such agent, and he is Bangladeshi, so not the same guy as Travel Guru mentioned above. Our guess is that the prospective worker/trainees use MOM’s pre-approval for these Training Employment Passes to enter Singapore without the usual tourist visa. However, the agents don’t even convert these prospective workers’/trainees’ pre-approval into proper Training Employment Passes after arrival here. Instead, during the 30 days they were allowed to stay in Singapore, the agent(s) obtains visas so they can cross over to Malaysia. Perhaps it is easier to get Malaysian visas from the Malaysian embassy in Singapore than from the Malaysian embassy in Dhaka.

Apparently, what then happens is that, once the Malaysian visas have been obtained, these workers are moved into Malaysia where (we believe) they only have 30 days of legal stay, as tourists. What happens after those 30 days, we have no idea. Possibly they all go underground to work in Malaysia’s informal economy?

Our informant mentioned that over a thousand such workers have come through this route.

To be clear, what we’re reporting here – beyond what we know of our own 13 inital cases plus several more who have since come to us, including women– remains unverified information. But the business models that our informants described sound more than plausible and we know that they have previously written to the authorities describing the same. That helps their credibility.

We’re just somewhat floored how large an issue this is, how long it has been going on, and how it took our article on our website to blast it wide open. We’re also a bit floored, if these reports of massive numbers are true, that there was one party which would have had all the early indicators – MOM’s work pass pre-approval system – yet the ministry didn’t seem to be taking any action, at least none visible to us or our equally astounded informants, while the problem grew and grew. Did MOM not even notice what their data was telling them?

How is that possible?

The Straits Times carried a follow-up story on 24 June 2025. Titled “Attempted misuse of work pass for foreign students or trainees ongoing for years: Industry insiders“, it may however be behind a paywall.

Providing some numbers, the newspaper wrote: “Responding to queries from ST, the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) revealed on June 19 that it has received 120 reports related to TEP abuse in 2025, but did not provide for comparison the number of reports received in past years. An MOM spokesperson also said an average of around 6,800 TEPs were approved each year over the last 10 years, with the majority of approvals for jobs in the services sector.”

About a week later, on 1 July 2025, a letter to the Straits Times editor from the Ministry of Manpower was published in the newspaper’s Forum section. Key paragraphs from that letter are copied here:

The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) has been monitoring TEP numbers. MOM has mounted several proactive operations to detect abuse of the TEP scheme. Arising from these operations, about 70 companies are now being investigated for offences such as making false declarations in work pass applications.

Making false declarations is a serious offence. If convicted, an offender can be fined up to $20,000, or jailed for up to two years, or both. Errant employers will also have their work pass privileges suspended.

MOM has established that some workers were misled by employers or agents who falsely promised that the TEP could be renewed or extended beyond the three-month validity period. In some cases, workers were told that the declared salary and work duration in their In-Principle Approval (IPA) letters were merely to comply with MOM regulations, and that private arrangements such as lower salaries or longer employment periods could be done. Such practices are a serious breach of MOM regulations and amount to circumventing work pass conditions.

These are exactly the abuses that TWC2 highlighted in our whistle-blowing article of 10 May 2025.