A young China national was fined $5,000 for being party to a criminal conspiracy to sell forged education certificates to interested parties. He Lingting, 21, who came to Singapore about seven years ago to study, is the first among four people to be convicted of the offence.

A district court heard in April last year, while she was with her boyfriend, Xu Changqing, 28, they met Xu Rui, 26, whom she later learnt was in the business of selling forged educational certificates to students in Singapore. Last December, she placed an advertisement on her mobile phone chatline application about these certificates.

In January this year, she received a response from a person later identified as Liang Yan Wei, 27, who seemed interested to buy the certificates. She negotiated with Liang via text messages on the cost of the purchase. Liang asked her to send him some samples of the forged certificates. She e-mailed him the documents on Jan 8.

Liang later arranged to meet her on the pretext of wanting to buy the certificates. When she turned up at Kovan MRT station however, she was arrested by the police. Her lawyer Ismail Atan said her client's then boyfriend was a bad influence on her and she had not profited from her actions. In imposing the fine, District Judge Eddy Tham took into account the role played by her as well as the possibility that she had been unduly influenced by her then boyfriend.