Singapore: A 51-year-old Indian woman was sentenced to prison for duping a man on a matchmatching service

• A Singapore court jailed a 51-year-old Indian-origin lady to seven months in prison.
• The woman duped an Indian man and his father out of more than SGD 5,000.
• She did it by impersonating a younger woman on a matchmaking website.

A Singapore court jailed a 51-year-old Indian-origin lady to seven months in prison on Tuesday for defrauding an Indian man and his father out of more than SGD 5,000 by impersonating a younger woman on a matchmaking website.

Maliha Ramu created a bogus profile for a 25-year-old single woman named Keerthana on the Tamil Matrimony website.

Maliha hid behind her relative’s photos and pretended to work at an army base overseas, where she wasn’t authorized to use a camera phone.

She pled guilty to two counts of cheating on Tuesday, with three more comparable counts being considered for punishment.

She had previously done time in prison for similar crimes committed in 2006 and 2007 that involved significantly greater quantities of money. She contacted victims in India and Australia in one case, proposing to marry them but instead defrauding them of SGD 225,000.

She was widowed and self-employed at the time of her most recent offences, according to the court.

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Govindandhanasekaran Murallikrishna, the victim’s father, signed up for an account on the dating website in November 2018 to locate a mate for his 29-year-old son.

When the victim’s father contacted her via the website, she requested that he call her at home and talk with her mother. Maliha, on the other hand, lived alone after her mother died in 2002. She pretended to be Keerthana’s mother and granted Govindandhanasekaran permission to speak to Keerthana.

Maliha began communicating with Govindandhanasekaran through WhatsApp text messages and conversations, posing as Keerthana.

She explained that she worked as a counsellor at an Australian army installation and that she was not permitted to have a camera phone. As a result, she turned down his demands for video calls.

She also showed him photos of her 27-year-old niece-in-law, who works for the Singapore Armed Forces, in order to convince him that this was Keerthena.

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She misled him into thinking Keerthana would marry him when she returned from Australia, claiming her employment contract would expire in May 2019. When that date arrived, she continued to lie, claiming that her contract had been extended for another three months.

She also stated that her mother was ill and was in the United States with her brother, and that she was unable to speak with them about their upcoming wedding.

She claimed she needed money to help her social work clients and begged Govindandhanasekaran for money. He transferred her SGD 4,750 on four times between December 2018 and October 2019. In addition, she grabbed SGD 1,000 from his father.

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