Yap Weng Wah (born 1983), alias Wai Loon or Loon, is a Malaysian serial sex offender, who formerly worked as a quality assurance engineer, and is currently jailed in Singapore for 76 sexual offences committed against 31 teenage boys aged between 11 and 15 in Singapore. He befriended his victims online, had sex with them and filmed his illegal acts. During police investigations, Yap was found to have raped 14 more boys in Malaysia in between his constant trips from Singapore to Malaysia before his arrest.
Yap was sentenced to 30 years in prison and 24 strokes of the cane, as he was assessed to remain a danger to society with his high risk of re-offending and the aggravating nature of his crimes. Yap was considered as one of the most high-profile pedophile sex offenders who was sentenced to lengthy jail terms for sex crimes against minors.
Early life Childhood and family Born sometime in 1983, Yap is the eldest of three children, having a brother and a sister. His birthplace and hometown is in Ipoh, Malaysia.
Yap grew up in a single-parent household, as his father left for New Zealand when he was eight years old and presumably never came back. His mother stayed and raised the three children by herself, sometimes under financial struggles.
Alleged childhood sexual encounter According to his lawyer, when Yap was in primary school, at the age of 12, he had his first sexual encounter with his male mathematics teacher, who performed both oral sex and anal sex on him. These sexual encounters would occur at least once or twice a week, and it lasted nine months until Yap finished school. According to his lawyer, as attributed to the lack of fatherly love in his childhood, Yap believed that his sexual acts with the teacher were acts of love and intimacy.
Education and employment in Singapore Yap went on to further his studies after his graduation from primary school. Yap graduated as a quality assurance engineer and starting in 2009 worked as one at ASM Technology in Singapore. According to a colleague, Yap, who was known as "Travis" at work, was a quiet individual who never showed any sign of sexual deviance.
Sexual offences Singapore While he was working in Singapore, Yap, then 26 years old, committed his sexual offences from November 2009 till June 2012, three months before he was arrested. In total, Yap committed offences against 31 pubescent boys aged between 11 and 15, who were not named to protect their identities.
Modus operandi Yap typically, through the Internet, looked for boys who lived or who went to school near his rental apartment in New Upper Changi Road, and later in Yishun. He would then befriend his targeted victims online and pretend to be an 18-year-old polytechnic student under the aliases Wai Loon or Loon. Sometimes, Yap would also say he was from Indonesia.
During these online interactions with those victims who accepted him as an online friend, Yap would present himself as an older brother-figure or mentor to gain their trust, and they would chat or message together over several weeks or months. Together with his victims, Yap talked about hobbies, movies, sports, and computer games. He would also find a way to bring up the topic of sex in the midst of these online conversations.
Yap would then set up physical meetings with the victims under the pretext of giving them gifts, playing computer games, or giving tips about bodybuilding. During these physical meetings, which took place in places like his rented Yishun flat, Woodlands, Hougang, Aljunied and Changi, a chalet at Downtown East, a hotel room in Geylang, and even toilet cubicles at public places like swimming pools and malls, Yap would then convince his victims to allow him to perform oral sex or anal sex on them (without a condom), which went on even if the boys refused, saying they were not homosexual, cried, or were reluctant. Except for one 12-year-old boy, the remaining 30 victims were sexually assaulted in this way during these meetings.
Yap would also use his phone or camera to film himself having sex with the boys. When the boys protested, Yap promised he would delete the footage, but saved these videos to his laptop to re-watch and masturbate to. At the time Yap was captured, the police found a total of 2,218 videos recorded and stored inside Yap's laptop. These videos were also cataloged with the names and ages of the victims, and the year Yap met the victims.
Details On the 23-page charge sheet filed by the prosecution in relation to the 76 criminal charges made against Yap, 7 charges involved 11-year-olds, 13 dealt with 12-year-olds, and 4 with 15-year-olds. The majority of the charges involved boys ages 13 and 14 – 32 and 20 charges, respectively. Fifty one charges were related to sexual penetration of a minor below 14 years old, 24 were for minors below 16, and one involved a charge of Yap asking a 12-year-old to film himself performing sex and sending the video to Yap; that 12-year-old boy was the same boy who was the only victim Yap never had sex with.
A select few of these 76 crimes were publicly released in certain articles covering Yap's crimes. One of these crimes took place on 4 February 2010, where in Hougang Swimming Complex, a 13-year-old boy was told to remove his school uniform in a toilet cubicle, where Yap sodomised him and filmed the act. In March 2010, a 15-year-old boy met up with Yap at a hotel, where Yap tried to undress and kiss the boy. Despite the victim's protests, Yap performed oral sex on him. On 25 September 2011, a 14-year-old boy was told to perform oral sex on Yap in a toilet cubicle in the Tampines Stadium.
Another case, which took place on an unspecified date, involved another boy whom Yap met and chatted with for a few months on Facebook before their first physical meeting at a mall. After the duo had lunch and played arcade games, he took the boy to his rented room to watch cartoons online while his landlord was in the living room. Yap later removed the boy's clothes and sexually assaulted him, promising it would not happen again. However each time they met, Yap assaulted him again either before or after taking the boy outdoors to watch movies or eat outside.
Malaysia Over the course of time during which Yap was preying on pre-teen males in Singapore, he had also extended his targets beyond Singapore and into Malaysia; during his yearly visits to Malaysia Yap would also target 14 boys, all of them below the age of 16. Yap filmed these acts, as he had done in Singapore to the 31 victims there. The offences in Malaysia were also brought to light when police arrested Yap in September 2012. However, since the crimes involving these 14 boys were not committed in Singapore, Yap did not face any formal charges related to these 14 boys when he was first arrested and charged.
Arrest and incarceration Capture and remand In June 2012, Yap's sexual offences were first discovered when the sister of one of Yap's 11-year-old victims checked her younger brother's mobile phone and found SMS messages between her brother and Yap. The brother and sister thus went to the police.
On 7 September 2012, after receiving a police report from another victim that Yap had sexually penetrated him, 29-year-old Yap was arrested by the police in his Yishun flat. Initially, Yap only confessed to having sex with three boys, but the 2,218 videos uncovered by the police had proven a much larger magnitude of his crimes than the extent to which Yap was willing to admit. On 8 September 2012, after he was formally charged in court for 76 sex-related charges, Yap was remanded for investigations. The arrest of Yap brought shock to those who knew him, including his colleagues and family back in Malaysia. His arrest and indictment was reported publicly only three years after his trial began.
It was reported that due to Yap's arrest, Yap's family experienced hard times: his sister was forced to drop out from university to find a job to feed the family, while his brother had to resign from his job to take care of his mother at home, and every week, the family had to spend 6 hours to travel from Ipoh to Singapore each way to visit Yap in prison where he was remanded and pending trial in Singapore.
Trial, conviction and psychiatric reports On 16 January 2015, two years and four months after his arrest, 31-year-old Yap Weng Wah was brought to trial in the High Court of Singapore, before High Court judge Woo Bih Li. At the start of the trial, Yap pleaded guilty to 12 counts of sexual penetration with a minor and agreed to have 64 other charges be taken into consideration during sentencing.
Bharat Saluja, a psychiatrist from the Institute of Mental Health (IMH), went to court and released a diagnosic report that Yap was suffering from hebephilia, a type of sexual preference for early adolescent children between 11 and 14 years of age. Saluja also testified in court that Yap's risk of reoffending was high. Tommy Tan, the defence's psychiatrist, agreed with Saluja's assessment that Yap had hebephilia and had a high propensity to reoffend. Dr. Tan also stated that Yap showed signs of major depressive disorder, and that, although he was not suicidal, long-term imprisonment would increase Yap's suicide risk.
In his second report, Saluja also testified that while it was hard for him to confidently say that Yap had a paedophilic disorder or paedophilia itself (sexual interest in prepubescent children), Yap's hunting of pubescent boys for sexual gratification did demonstrate a deviant pattern of sexualized behaviour similar to that of high risk sex offenders displaying paedophilic tendencies.
Sentencing submissions The prosecution sought a sentence of at least 30 years' imprisonment and the legal maximum of 24 strokes of the cane for Yap, describing him as a "clear and present danger to society". Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) David Khoo argued that Yap's offences had shown a "high degree" of premeditation and through his exploitation of the Internet, he had clearly targeted a vulnerable group of victims, with whom he carried out the sexual acts unprotected in all cases. Not only had he breached the trust of the boys, Yap had also caused significant harm to his victims during the time of his crimes, and had morally corrupted the boys in the course of these criminal acts, which took place over a prolonged period of time and were committed against a large number of victims. For these above factors, along with the difficulty to detect crimes against children, Khoo asked for Yap to be severely punished under the law. While the prosecution acknowledged that generally, caning would not be imposed in sex-related cases similar to that of Yap's unless there is violence exhibited against the victims, they said that Yap's sexual penetration of the boys "intrinsically constitutes an act of violence", and since the circumstances of Yap's case were sufficiently aggravating as to be repulsive to human conscience, caning was justifiable and perhaps even essential, it was argued.