Law graduate fined $10,000 for using forged law degree and transcript

SINGAPORE - A law graduate was so determined to find a job with the Singapore Legal Service that she resorted to forgery twice in about four years.

Jaya Anil Kumar, 29, was fined $10,000 on Thursday (Jan 18) after admitting to two charges of fraudulently using a forged academic transcript in 2013 and a forged law degree in 2016.

Four other charges were taken into consideration in sentencing.

The court heard that when Jaya first applied to the Legal Service Commission (LSC) Secretariat in January 2013, she submitted a genuine degree certificate. But she amended her results in the transcript to reflect better grades for 21 of her 27 subjects.

Her forgery was not detected and she was granted an interview, but was not offered a job.

In October 2016, Jaya applied to the LSC Secretariat again. This time, she forged both her degree and her transcript.

She falsely stated that she had been awarded a second class honours (upper division) from NUS - instead of lower division - and doctored the results of 18 of her 27 subjects to reflect better grades.

When the LSC Secretariat contacted Jaya on Oct 27, 2016 to seek her consent to ask NUS for her class ranking and percentile ranking, she declined.

Later that day, a staff of the LSC Secretariat asked her about the differences in the documents she had submitted in 2013 and 2016. She claimed that she had "mis-scanned'' her documents and might have mixed up her documents with that of her friends.

That evening, she e-mailed her genuine documents to the LSC Secretariat which did not process her application further. It lodged a police report on Nov 3, 2016.

Jaya could have been jailed for up to four years and/or fined per charge.

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