Insurance Agent Who Posed As 'Lord Voldermort' to Threaten Ex-Clients Gets Jail Time

Insurance agents are not the most likable people. That's barely surprising, considering they work in one of the top five most hated industries by customers. And people like Singapore-based Ye Lin Myint is definitely not helping to change the reputation of the insurance biz.

Myint, a 36-year-old ex-insurance agent originally from Myanmar, has just been sentenced to two years and five months in jail after committing what’s said to be one of the worst cases of harassment under the Protection of Harassment Act in Singapore, using some help from the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Under the pseudonym Lord Voldermort—a misspelling of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named—the Singapore permanent resident began terrorizing former clients as revenge after they canceled insurance policies that they had bought from him.

Between August to September 2017, Myint harassed a total of 33 former and potential clients, demanding them to transfer a large sum of bitcoin to his account, which was worth between $6,500 and $9,900 SGD ($4,800 and $7,300 USD)at the time.

Aside from emails, Lord Voldermort sent a blast of letters to his victims’ housings units and their neighbors. At first glance, it’s hard to take the letters seriously as they seemed to be inspired by a howler, which according to the Harry Potter lore, is an enchanted letter wrapped in a red envelope that’s sent to direct abuse, complaint, and criticism to the recipient.

To show he wasn’t messing around, Miynt emphasized his intent on the opening paragraph, which read: ‘’THIS IS NOT A SPAM OR A PRANK. THIS IS FOR REAL. PAY FULL ATTENTION.’’ That opening might seem childish, but he wrote truly frightening stuff in his letters and emails. In an email sent to one of his victims, he wrote: "For the past few months, I have been monitoring you and your wife and I know everything about you and your family. I know where you live, where you work. I can make your life total humiliated and miserable [sic] in your Myanmar community. I can make you become jobless. I can even physically harm you and your wife and your parents if I want to."

Although none of the recipients took it seriously enough to give in to his demands, they all reported the harassment to local police. Myint is now arrested and facing a two years and five months sentence.

“[Ye Lin Myint’s] fanciful use of character names such as Harry Potter’s nemesis Lord Voldemort, and Dr Bruce Banner, the genteel alter ego of Marvel character The Incredible Hulk, should not distract from the malign purpose of intimidating messages, which was to maliciously instil fear and extort sums from individuals he knew and against whom he harbored grudges,” district judge Marvin Bay told Today Online.

In Singapore, aggressive insurance agents have been the subject of online forums, where people post their encounters with agents who are too pushy and "borderline harassing" them.

To be fair, insurance agents bear the burden of meeting each of their companies' targets. So being pushy is the profession's first requirement, though we can all agree that Myint just took it a little too far. Besides, he knew what eventually happens to Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter, right?