SINGAPORE: A 31-year-old woman working as a cleaner was jailed for six weeks on Tuesday (Dec 5) after she lied to her friend about getting him a job and took money for it. Jayanthi Subramaniam, a Malaysian, pled guilty to one count of cheating. She made friends with a 31-year-old Indian national through TikTok in 2021. Though the pair never met, she lied that she could process job and work permit applications for a company she was deployed at for a fee and asked the man for S$5,000.
The man then contacted another friend, who recommended two people for the job. Jayanthi also requested S$5,000 from each person to process the work pass and job applications, but the man became suspicious due to the large sum of money involved. She said she would accept S$2,500 from each person as a deposit. Eventually, the man arranged for S$5,000 to be transferred to Jayanthi’s bank account.
Jayanthi told her victims that she was working for DHL Singapore and claimed that there were job openings for foreign workers there. She also offered to submit the work pass permit applications, even though DHL Singapore did not employ her and there were no such job opportunities.
When the man got suspicious and lodged a police report on Oct 1, Jayanthi was arrested three days later. However, by then, she had spend the money. In mitigation, she told the court that she was a single mother supporting two young children and an ailing mother on dialysis. For cheating, Jayanthi could have been jailed for up to ten years and could have been fined.
Read related: Man scams MacBook buyers on Carousell; sends them dummy items after they pay
Earlier in November, the police arrested a 31-year-old man for his alleged involvement in several e-commerce scams. The man’s scams involved Apple MacBook laptops, where, between Oct 28 and Nov 2, he had allegedly sold MacBooks on the e-commerce platform Carousell. Still, victims received dummy items after they made payments via bank transfers. The man is believed to be involved in at least eight e-commerce scams amounting to more than $27,000. He will be charged in court on Nov 30 with cheating. If found guilty, he faces a jail term of up to 10 years and a fine.
During a two-week operation between Nov 10 and Nov 23, 229 men and 87 women aged between 15 and 73 were taken in for investigations. They were involved in more than 1,100 scams as either scammers or money mules. In a statement on Friday (Nov 24), the police said that the scams included job scams, malware-enabled scams, phishing scams, Internet love scams and e-commerce scams and involved losses of more than S$8.5 million. /TISG