An operations executive who spent $10,000 which had been wrongly credited into his savings account was jailed for three months on Wednesday.

Muhammad Dzulhisham Rusly, 24, pleaded guilty to dishonestly misappropriating the amount from July 4 to 27 last year.

A district court heard that on June 28 last year, his former employer, WMG, a distribution mailing house, mailed out a $1,015 cheque to him after he was terminated that month. He deposited the cheque into his POSB savings account.

On July 5, the company's accountant found out that the cheque that had been issued to Dzulhisham and deposited was $11,015, and not $1,015.

She asked for a copy of the cheque from Standard Chartered Bank and discovered that the amount printed was correct but the sum written on the cheque was $11,015. She then lodged a police report and Dzulhisham was arrested on July 27.

Dzulhisham had said in his police statement that he knew that an extra $10,000 had been credited into his bank account and that he had not checked where the money came from. He also knew that his last drawn salary was about $1,000.

At an earlier hearing, Dzulhisham told the court that he had spent the money because of his family's financial difficulties.

But the prosecution highlighted that he spent up to $700 on clothing, up to $1,000 on prawning activities over several weeks and bought multiple electronic goods. He said he could not recall how he spent the remaining $4,000.

When asked by District Judge Lee Poh Choo, he agreed that he did not tell the police that he used part of the money to settle debts.

Dzulhisham, who said he got married recently, could have been jailed for up to two years and fined for the offence.