JUST three days after accepting an offer to join a rival bank, a Citibank officer began transferring confidential and sensitive customer information from the bank's database to her personal e-mail account without approval.

The police probe that followed led Koh Meng Yang, 29, to plead guilty to 20 charges under the Computer Misuse Act on Tuesday morning.

District Judge Jasvendar Kaur fined her $6,500 on each charge amounting to a total of $130,000.

At Citibank, Koh had access to customer details stored in the bank's database and she emailed existing spreadsheets of sensitive customer details to her personal email account. She also extracted additional data from the bank's Universal Work Station System in the form of softcopy printscreens and subsequently emailed them to her personal account.

Koh's father, who was present in court, agreed to use the $50,000 bail money he had earlier posted for her , towards paying off the fine. District Judge Jasvender Kaur allowed an application by Koh's lawyer Christine Sekhon for the remaining $80,000 portion of fine to be paid in 12 monthly instalments.

The offences took place over a week from June 30 at a time when she had contemplated leaving Citibank where she worked as a relationship manager in Citigold at the Orchard Road Branch. She accepted an offer to join UBS just three days before the offences were committed where her job scope would have been similar to what she did at Citibank.

Her Citibank job involved bringing in new clients, as well as managing existing clients with investable assets of $200,000 or more.

Koh was subsequently sacked from Citibank and paid off some $15,000 in a civil suit brought against her by Citibank.