Six Malaysian men are starting a combined 60 years and four months in prison for a machete raid on a crypto-settled home game in one of Singapore's priciest estates. The cash and the watches are still gone, and so is the seventh man.
Just after 2am on Thursday 18 April 2024, a private poker game in Singapore's King Albert Park had almost everything a serious home game is supposed to have. Seven players at the table, drawn from Singapore, Indonesia and China. A South Korean dealer hired for the night. A hostess, a Chinese national whose husband rented the house, plus a live-in helper running the game and a Malaysian masseuse working shoulders between hands. Stakes that the prosecution said could reach several hundred thousand dollars, all settled in cryptocurrency rather than chips and cash.
What the game did not have was a locked gate. Seven men in black, gloves and ski masks walked through it. Three carried machetes and two carried baseball bats. Within minutes the eleven people in the house were bound with duct tape and cable ties, the hostess was being ordered to move crypto out of her phone wallets, and a safe was being emptied. The gang was across the border into Malaysia before most of Singapore woke up.
On Monday 14 September 2026, Singapore's High Court sentenced six of the seven. Each pleaded guilty to armed gang robbery and to a money laundering charge for moving the proceeds to Malaysia, according to the Straits Times report syndicated by AsiaOne. The haul was put at S$4.9 million, most of it crypto, which CNA converted to roughly US$3.9 million.
For a poker audience the detail that stands out is the payment rail. The game ran on the same crypto settlement that the licensed rooms on our crypto poker sites page use for deposits and cashouts, except here every player's balance for the night sat in wallets on one phone, in one house, behind one open gate. That is not a poker story so much as a custody story, and the robbers understood it better than the players did.
The sentences, man by man
The court treated this as a two-tier operation: the pair who designed it and the crew hired to supply the violence. The sentences follow that split.
Add it up and the six men drew 60 years and four months between them, plus 120 strokes of the cane. Prosecutor Dillon Kok's submission, as reported by The Straits Times, was that on an inflation-adjusted basis Singapore has not seen a bigger robbery since the 1970s; we have not found an independent list to check that against. Wong and Goh's sentences also fold in vice charges, which the same report said involved bringing Japanese women into Singapore's sex trade.
The seventh man, Muhammad Yusuf Kassim, 33, is still at large and believed to be in Thailand. He is also, on the prosecution's account, the crew member who walked away with the most money.
Where the S$4.9 million went
The number moved as the case did. When the Singapore Police Force announced the first two charges on 2 May 2024, it put the loss at S$4.34 million in cash, crypto and luxury watches, taken from eleven victims aged 25 to 45. By the time the pleas were entered the figure in court was S$4.9 million. Police have clawed back crypto valued at about S$1.69 million. Nothing else has been recovered.
The muscle was paid in a way that tells you how liquid the loot was. Wong and Goh had promised Hamidon RM1.5 million, which the Straits Times put at about S$467,000, to split among his team. Back in Kuala Lumpur the two planners cashed out a quantity of USDT, the dollar-pegged stablecoin, into RM1.49 million of ringgit and paid the crew. Hamidon's cut was RM445,000. Kartik, Hashim and Tauffiq took RM100,000 apiece, a further RM100,000 went to friends who had helped, and Yusuf, the one still running, walked off with RM645,000. Those figures add up to RM1.49 million exactly. The physical cash and the watches stayed with Wong and Goh.
A stack of chips has to be carried out and converted. A wallet transfer coerced at machete-point is already converted. For the bulk of the take the gang did not need a fence, just a phone and a border.
Two and a half years from the raid to the dock
The case took time because the gang left Singapore within hours and had to be brought back piece by piece. Dates are from the Mothership sentencing report, the Straits Times account, the police release and Mothership's May 2024 arrest coverage.
Physically, the victims got off lightly. Four had minor wrist injuries from the bindings and none needed further treatment. Some worked themselves free after the gang left and one called the police, which is how the clock started on a manhunt that ran for six and a half months across two countries.
Why a home game in Singapore is an online poker story
Singapore is not a poker jurisdiction in any conventional sense. There is no licensed online poker, and a crypto-settled cash game in a rented mansion is not something anyone at the table was going to report to the authorities, which is partly why an open gate passed for a security plan. That makes the King Albert Park game a fairly pure example of what a modern underground nosebleed game looks like in 2026: a rented mansion, a hired dealer, a masseuse, an international player pool, and stakes that never touch a chip because everything settles on-chain.
That last part is what connects this to the online world. Crypto settlement is now normal at regulated rooms, where it lives behind KYC, cold storage and withdrawal limits. Dropped into a living room, the same technology turns a poker game into a single point of failure. The prosecution's chronology makes clear the gang was never attracted by the poker. What drew them, per Mothership's account of two men in financial trouble, was a friend's tip that several hundred thousand dollars a session sat in phone wallets behind a gate nobody bothered to close. A regular talking about the game is the oldest vulnerability in private poker, and no technology fixes it.
What is still open
Three things. Yusuf remains a fugitive with, on the prosecution's figures, RM645,000 of the crew's payout. Roughly S$3.21 million in cash, watches and unrecovered crypto is still out there. And the hostess, her husband and the seven players have not been named or charged in any coverage we have seen, which for a game that size in Singapore is notable in itself. The court's interest was in the men with the machetes, not the men at the table.
If you like settling in USDT or Bitcoin but would rather your balance sat behind segregated funds and a withdrawal process than in someone's phone, we rank the licensed crypto rooms by payout speed, traffic and how they actually handle your money.
See the crypto poker rankingsSources: The Straits Times via AsiaOne, 14 Sep 2026; Mothership, 14 Sep 2026; CNA, 14 Sep 2026; Singapore Police Force news release, 2 May 2024; Mothership, 2 May 2024; Must Share News, 2 May 2024. Sentences, ages and the payout split are as reported from the prosecution's statement of facts.
