SINGAPORE - A former primary school teacher, who was jailed twice for sexually preying on teenage boys, committed similar offences again and was sentenced to six strokes of the cane and eight years of corrective training.

Chock Soon Seng, now 43, will undergo corrective training, which is a prison regime for repeat offenders without the usual one-third remission for good behaviour.

He pleaded guilty last month to four counts of sexual penetration involving two of three underage boys he had met in 2018 and 2019.

Fourteen other charges involving the two teenagers and the third victim were considered in sentencing.

Chock was working as a freelance tutor at the time of his latest offences.

The court heard that his first victim, a 15-year-old boy, had in 2018 posted an advertisement on an online classifieds website indicating that he was interested in looking for women.

Chock responded to the ad in April that year, and the teenager told him that he was not a homosexual.

But Chock persuaded him to "experiment".

Deputy Public Prosecutors Chin Jincheng and Chong Yong said Chock made no attempts to verify the teenager's age and instead offered to pay him for sexual acts.

Chock went to the teenager's home on April 23, 2018, where they performed sex acts on each other. He later gave the boy an unspecified amount of cash and left.

The prosecutors said: "The cash was less than what had been agreed upon and the accused informed (the victim) that he had yet to receive his salary."

Chock continued to pester the boy to meet him again but the latter was not interested. He then promised to pay the boy if he agreed to a second meeting.

The teenager relented and they performed sexual acts on each other at the boy's home on May 11, 2018. He blocked Chock on WhatsApp after this second meeting.

Chock met the second victim, a 13-year-old boy, through a gay dating app in 2018 and the teenager told him that he was a Primary 6 pupil.

The pair met on April 15 that year and they performed sex acts on each other at a staircase landing of a multi-storey carpark. They met again two days later and did similar acts in a toilet cubicle at Punggol Community Club.

Chock's offences came to light in June 2019 when the boy's mother found some sex-related conversations on her son's mobile phone. She alerted the police and officers arrested Chock soon after.

He was first jailed for 10 months in 2010, when he was a primary school teacher, after he tried to persuade two 13-year-old boys to let him watch them perform a sexual act.

In 2014, he was sentenced to three years' jail for offences that include sexually abusing a 14-year-old boy and threatening to put his naked pictures online.