Tuesday 10 February 2009
Harassed architect obtains court order for Singtel to reveal caller information
An architect and his wife received more than 100 harassing telephone calls over three days. He made a successful application to the High Court to seek the disclosure of the name, telephone number and address of the caller by SingTel.
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Harassed architect obtains court order for Singtel to reveal caller information
Tay Peck Gek, Lianhe Zaobao
6 February 2009
An architect and his wife received more than 100 harassing telephone calls over three days. He made a successful application to the High Court to seek the disclosure of the name, telephone number and address of the caller by SingTel.
Qiu Dingren, 49, claims that he and his wife, Chen Mingmei, 40, a banker, received more than 100 harassing telephone calls on December 24, 26 and 30 last year. They received nearly 50 such calls on Christmas Eve alone. However, Qiu Dingren did not mention how exactly the caller harassed him and his wife.
More than 100 calls over three days; intends to file injunction against caller
In order to determine the identity of the caller so as to file an injunction, Qiu Dingren made an application to the High Court through his lawyer Lin Mingjin, and succeeded in obtaining a court order for SingTel to reveal the caller information, including names, telephone numbers and addresses.
Qiu stated in his affidavit that only a small number of the calls had originating numbers. The rest were made from private numbers. Private numbers are kept confidential and will not be shown even if the other party subscribes to a caller number display service.
Suspects that harasser is an acquaintance
Qiu Dingren said that the calls with originating numbers were all made from the mobile phone of an acquaintance. This has led him to believe that this person was the harasser. He said that this particular person had made numerous calls to him and his wife. Even though most of the calls did not have caller identification, Qiu and his wife could recognise the voice of the caller.
Qiu Dingren said that the harasser had called his home and asked to speak to his three-year-old son. Police reports were lodged by him and his wife on four occasions for this matter and they even received three such calls when they were at the police station on one occasion.
Magistrates’ Court had ordered police to investigate the matter
Qiu Dingren stated in his affidavit that he was unwilling to stand the harassment and had tried to stop the actions through various means. Apart from changing his home telephone number and not answering calls, he had issued a lawyer’s letter and private summons to the person in question and had even filed a complaint with the Magistrates’ Court. According to the court document, an order was made for the police to investigate this matter. However, Qiu refused to comment on whether these channels had any effect when asked by the reporter.
On the advice of the lawyer, Qiu Dingren subsequently decided to apply for an injunction from the court to stop the harasser from continuing to call his home and family members. In order to ascertain the identity of the harasser, he applied to the court to order SingTel to reveal the information of the caller.
High Court Assistant Registrar David Lee feels that the identity of the caller was not the key consideration in Qiu’s application for an injunction. However, the severity of the matter as demonstrated by the large number of harassing calls received by Qiu was sufficient to make the court grant an order for him to get the necessary information on the caller. However, Lee pointed out that similar applications in the future may not necessarily be successful.
SingTel needs to provide the relevant information within four weeks from January 12, the date when the order was issued. It is understood that SingTel has yet to provide the information to Qiu at this point in time.
It is worth mentioning that SingTel does not keep records of fixed-line calls. Therefore, it can only provide Qiu and his wife with the details of calls made to their mobile phones. SingTel also cannot provide details if the calls were made through a public telephone or from a different country.
In addition, SingTel is unable to provide details if the caller is a private number subscriber of another operator.
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