SINGAPORE — A sports agent has been charged with cheating 21 people of about S$87,000 from 2017 to 2019, including selling tickets for a high-profile football match and concert.

Mohamed Hafidz Ja’afar was first hauled to court last Friday (Aug 27) and now faces 21 criminal charges. 

The 38-year-old Singaporean was fired from his manager role at Swim Schooling — a swimming school set up by Olympic champion Joseph Schooling — shortly after the cheating allegations first surfaced in July 2019.

Several individuals had posted on Facebook, saying that they bought tickets from Hafidz for the International Champions Cup (ICC) football match between English club Manchester United and Italian club Inter Milan that was held here on July 20 in 2019.

However, they did not receive the tickets at all. When they contacted Hafidz, he did not respond to their calls or phone text messages.

He was arrested on July 24, four days after the football match.

Court documents stated that he allegedly cheated more than a dozen people over tickets for the game.

In one instance on April 3, 2019, a man transferred S$1,721 to Hafidz through the PayNow platform. Three others transferred more than S$2,000 in total to this man, who then transferred the sums to Hafidz.

A few days earlier, another alleged victim had transferred S$4,904 to Hafidz for for the ICC match tickets as well as concert tickets for the popular Irish band U2, which played its first-ever gig in Singapore in 2019.

Court documents showed that Hafidz also allegedly cheated some others over “investments”, with someone transferring him S$16,000 for a “shoe investment”.

Another man who wanted to buy 52 pairs of shoes transferred S$17,516 to him in June 2019.

The earliest alleged instance of cheating happened in November 2017, when Hafidz was said to have tricked a man into believing that he could deliver an assortment of apparels for the Triathlon Association of Singapore. 

The man then gave Hafidz a cheque for S$6,030 made out to Hafidz’s marketing company, Equatre Pte Ltd, which acted as a consultant for the association at the time.

Court records showed that he intends to plead guilty. He will return to court on Oct 8 and remains out on bail of S$10,000.

If convicted, he could be jailed for up to 10 years and fined for each cheating charge.

Hafidz previously worked in communications at the Singapore Swimming Association and was later hired by the Schooling family in 2016 to help out with logistics. 

He was hired by Swim Schooling in 2017 as an administrator before he became a manager on a part-time basis.