Up to $1 million bail offered to 3 men charged with fraud in case linked to Nvidia chips

Bail has been offered to three men allegedly linked to computer servers exported to Malaysia that might contain Nvidia chips.

Chinese national Li Ming, 51, was offered bail of $1 million, while Singaporean Alan Wei Zhaolun, 48, was offered bail of $800,000.

Aaron Woon Guo Jie, 40, also a Singaporean, was offered bail of $600,000.

Li faces two charges – one of fraud and one under the Computer Misuse Act.

Woon and Wei each face two fraud charges.

Li is accused of committing fraud on Supermicro, a supplier of servers, by claiming in 2023 that the end user of the servers would be a company he controlled, called Luxuriate Your Life.

He also allegedly accessed an OCBC corporate bank account without authorisation to make and receive transfers for Luxuriate Your Life, on June 19, 2024. 

Woon and Wei are accused of being in a criminal conspiracy to defraud two suppliers of servers, Dell and Supermicro. 

They allegedly made false representations in 2024 that the servers would not be transferred to a person other than the authorised end users.

The pair worked at Aperia Cloud Services, a Singapore-based technology company. Wei was the company’s chief executive and Woon its chief operating officer.

In court on March 13, Li’s lawyer Wendell Wong did not contest the $1 million amount for bail, but said he is reserving the right to revisit this in the future.

He also clarified with the prosecution aspects of the conditions of bail it was imposing.

These included information about “exclusion zones” that Li would not be allowed to go to, and the prosecution witnesses he was not permitted to interact with.

The prosecution said the “exclusion zones” included immigration points, including Woodlands Checkpoint and Changi Airport.

It added that Li’s wife was a person of interest in investigations and Li should not speak to her about evidence and investigations related to the case.

Wei’s lawyer Shashi Nathan and Woon’s lawyer Sanjiv Kumar Rajan asked the court for lower bail amounts for their clients, noting that they were local and had roots here.

In response, the prosecution said they face serious charges, and investigations on the scale of the offences are ongoing.

The prosecution said the total amount involved in Wei’s and Woon’s cases was believed to be around US$250 million (S$333.9 million), while the total amount in Li’s case was believed to be US$140 million.

It added that Wei is believed to have received an eight-figure dividend, while Woon received a seven-figure bonus from a company involved in the case.

The cases against all three men were adjourned to May 2.

Preliminary investigations showed that servers from US firms Dell and Supermicro, possibly embedded with Nvidia artificial intelligence (AI) chips, were sent to Singapore-based companies before they were exported to Malaysia.

The probe came after an anonymous tip-off.

Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam said on March 3 that the servers most likely contained items subject to export controls by the US.

The US government had in 2022 imposed a number of export controls to restrict the sale of high-performance AI chips to China.

Questions were raised in the US earlier in 2025 when a Chinese start-up launched DeepSeek, an AI platform allegedly using chips from Nvidia, a leading AI chip designer in the US.

The launch of DeepSeek in January wiped around US$1 trillion off the value of US tech stocks.

The authorities in the US are looking into the potential circumvention of its export controls for advanced Nvidia chips.

The chip designer in a statement said there was no reason to believe DeepSeek had obtained any export-controlled products from Singapore.

Mr Shanmugam said the authorities in Singapore are investigating if Malaysia was a final destination for the servers or if the servers went somewhere else.

He added that if there were false representations within Singapore about the servers’ final destination, then an offence under the country’s laws had been committed.

Source: The Straits Times © SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction.

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