The girl already served jail time for comparable offences in 2006, 2007. (Representational)
Singapore:
A 51-year-old Indian-origin girl was on Tuesday sentenced to seven months’ jail by a Singapore court docket for duping an Indian man and his father of greater than SGD 5,000 by masquerading as a youthful girl on a matchmaking web site.
Maliha Ramu had posted a pretend profile for a 25-year-old single girl named Keerthana on the Tamil Matrimony web site, TODAY newspaper reported.
Maliha used her relative’s images and prevented video calls by saying she labored at a military base abroad and was not allowed to make use of a digital camera cellphone.
On Tuesday, she pleaded responsible to 2 dishonest prices, with one other three comparable counts considered for sentencing.
She had already served jail time some 15 years in the past for comparable offences dedicated in 2006 and 2007, involving a lot bigger sums of cash. In one case, she befriended victims in India and Australia, promising to marry them however dishonest them of SGD 225,000 as an alternative.
The court docket heard that on the time of her newest offences, she was widowed and self-employed.
In November 2018, the daddy of her sufferer, Govindandhanasekaran Murallikrishna, signed up for an account on the matchmaking web site to discover a associate for his 29-year-old son.
When the sufferer’s father contacted her via the web site, she requested him to name on her dwelling quantity and converse to her mom. However, Maliha’s mom had died in 2002 and he or she lived alone. She pretended as Keerthana’s mom and gave her approval for Govindandhanasekaran to talk to Keerthana.
From then on, posing as Keerthana, Maliha spoke to Govindandhanasekaran via WhatsApp textual content messages and calls.
She informed them that she labored as a counsellor at a military base in Australia and was not allowed to make use of a digital camera cellphone. Because of that, she rejected his requests for video calls.
She additionally despatched him images of her 27-year-old niece-in-law, who works for the Singapore Armed Forces, to guide him to consider this was what Keerthena appeared like.
She led him to consider that Keerthana would marry him when she returned from Australia, saying that her employment contract would finish in May 2019. But when that date got here round, she additional lied that her contract had been prolonged for 3 extra months.
She additionally stated her mom was sick and was within the United States along with her brother, so she was unable to debate their wedding ceremony with them.
She requested Govindandhanasekaran for cash after claiming she wanted money to assist her social work purchasers. From December 2018 to October 2019, he transferred her SGD 4,750 in complete over 4 events. She additionally took over SGD 1,000 from his father.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is revealed from a syndicated feed.)