SINGAPORE, May 16 — A housewife earned S$2,000 (RM6,1000) a month on average by selling ovulation and pregnancy test kits online, which she had been importing from China for two years.

However, when she was picked up at Changi Airport bringing in thousands of the kits, they were found to be unregistered medical devices. She did not hold a valid importer’s licence.

Yesterday, Chinese national Pan Feng was fined S$16,000 in the State Courts after pleading guilty to two charges under the Health Products Act. Another six charges were taken into consideration for sentencing.

The court heard that the illegal importation operation was detected when Pan, a 35-year-old Singapore permanent resident, arrived at Changi Airport on March 30, 2016.

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Immigration and Checkpoints Authority officers searched her luggage and discovered 8,201 “David Ovulation Test” kits and 7,400 “David Pregnancy Test” kits.

The officers seized the sets before referring the matter to the Health Sciences Authority (HSA) for investigation.

During questioning, Pan admitted that she had brought in the kits from China and intended to sell them on the Qoo10 e-commerce platform. She began importing pregnancy and ovulation test kits when she realised they were in demand.

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She would sell each pregnancy kit for S$0.35, and each ovulation test kit for S$0.40. She did this for about two years, with her customers either paying her through Qoo10 or directly contacting her on chat application WhatsApp to order the kits from her.

She usually earned a profit of about S$0.20 for each kit, raking in an average of S$2,000 a month from her scheme. On that basis, she was selling about 10,000 kits a month.

Prosecuting Counsel Sangeeta Kumar from the HSA told the court that the authority’s licensing scheme allows it to identify the importers, and enables only dealers who comply with basic quality system requirements to import such medical devices into Singapore.

“For devices that have not been registered with HSA, their safety and performance has not been ascertained. Unregistered test kits may not comply with applicable product standards and may prove to be defective,” she said.

“Pregnancy test kits and ovulation test kits that are not able to perform accurately may end up generating an unacceptable number of false negative or positive results,” she added. — TODAY