A 64-year-old woman continued to use her bank accounts to receive funds from people she did not know, despite receiving repeated warnings by the Commercial Affairs Department (CAD) not to do so.
The funds, which Ng Koon Lay received in sums as high as US$88,000 (S$120,740), turned out to be proceeds from scams.
Ng was sentenced to 20 months' jail yesterday, after pleading guilty to one charge of dishonestly receiving stolen property, another relating to transferring criminal proceeds, and two charges relating to assisting another person to retain criminal proceeds.
Another 16 similar charges were considered during sentencing by District Judge Salina Ishak.
Ng became acquainted with a "Greg L Johnson" through social media platform Facebook in 2015.
In August 2016, Greg told Ng, who was in some financial difficulty, that a friend of his was willing to provide a $9,000 loan to her.
However, she had to provide details of her bank account to receive a sum of money, and she could deduct the loan amount from it.
She also had to transfer the remaining amount to another account.
Ng provided a United Overseas Bank account to Greg and received $71,000, which turned out to be proceeds from an e-mail spoofing scam.
She then transferred $62,000 of the proceeds to another account.
The following month, CAD contacted Ng twice, via a call and a face-to-face interview, warning her not to use her bank account to receive funds from unknown individuals.
While Ng surrendered her Facebook account to CAD after the interview, she set up a second one to keep in contact with Greg, who promised her another loan.
She received US$88,000 in her Citibank account, of which she kept $6,500 and transferred the remaining amount to two other accounts.
The sum she received had been obtained through an e-mail scam.
Ng was also instructed by another person, known as "David Bay", whom she met online in 2015.
In 2017, David told her to provide bank accounts to receive funds, which were to pay for his hospitalisation fees and business.
In return, she would be allowed to use some of the funds. She then opened two accounts - one with Maybank and the other with CIMB - and mailed the accounts' ATM cards and corresponding personal identification numbers to a Malaysian address provided by David.
The proceeds from various Internet love scams, in the sums of $47,050 and $174,750, were later transferred to the Maybank and CIMB accounts respectively.
Judge Salina granted Ng's request to defer her sentence until Monday so that she could inform her current employer of her conviction.
