Buying Singapore Airline Shares on Behalf of Your Colleague? How Strange Can It Get?

Last Friday afternoon, I received a strange call from my colleague Donald. Donald does not normally invest in stocks as he does not like to speculate. Stock market is a very dangerous place he once told me. The last SGX stock he held was Hyflux whereby he decided to "play with a little bit of money". Of course, the current tragic fate of Hyflux further reinforced his mindset that the stock market is an extremely dangerous and evil place that sucks out your money like a black-hole. I was thus rather surprised to receive his phone call.

The conversation went like this:

"Hey BK, how have you been?" Donald asked. 

"Hi Donald, I am good! Thanks. What's up?" I replied.

Donald excitedly responded, "BK, what do you think of Singapore Airline? Got potential to go up further a not? I think I want to play some of my money in it as the price is at an all-time low." 

 "Oh, I see. It should be ok lah. Temasek will come out save SIA no matter what. This is the rice bowl that creates job for many Singaporeans." I remarked casually.

Next, Donald added, "Great minds think alike man. BK, do you mind helping me buy 1,000 shares for SIA using your internet trading account? Very long time since I last bought shares. I forgot my own user ID and password for my online trading account. Worse still, I also can't recall which brokerage I had an account with. I hope to get some SIA stocks while it is on an uptrend to make some money. After price goes up further next week, you help me sell away and then just transfer the profit to me lah."

Deep in my mind, I was wondering what the heck is this guy talking about? Alarm bell started ringing in my head. Was Donald asking me to be a banker and finance for him the Singapore Airline stock purchase on behalf using my trading account? What if instead of "uptrend" SIA price dropped drastically next week? Will he pay me back then? Was this guy serious?

In a joking tone, I immediately closed him off, "Bro, you know our stupid Boss increased our pay cut from 10% to 30% recently and that I am rather short of cash now and even have to apply to defer my monthly housing mortgage payment with the bank till end of the year. If you really need me to use my brokerage account to buy for you, please do a PayNow transfer to my bank account fast. Also, I give you friendly discount of only S$100 for custodian service fees.....haha. By the way, you trust me with holding thousands of dollars for you meh?"

Upon sensing my reluctance (and probably the S$100 custodian service fees), Donald said that he will try calling his stock broker's customer service support to resend him his user ID and password.  I heaved a sigh of relief after that. Guess I was lucky and managed to get the message across to him to back off his weird request. By the way, I am not even close knit to this colleague so it was really a strange encounter akin to the Chinese classic "Strange Tale of Liao Zhai".