A 51-year-old Indian-origin woman was sentenced to seven months in prison by a Singapore court for allegedly duping an Indian man and his father over SGD 5,000 by posing as a young woman on a matchmaking website.
Today newspaper reported that Maliha Ramu had posted a fake profile for a 25-year-old unmarried woman named Keerthana on the Tamil Matrimony website.
Maleeha used pictures of her relative and avoided video calls saying she works at an army base abroad and is not allowed to use camera phones.
On Tuesday, he pleaded guilty to two fraud charges, taking into account three other similar counts for the sentence.
She had already served a prison sentence about 15 years ago for similar crimes committed in 2006 and 2007, involving huge sums of money. In one case, he befriended victims in India and Australia, promising to marry them but instead defrauding them of SGD 225,000.
The court heard that at the time of her latest offences, she was widowed and self-employed.
In November 2018, the victim’s father, Govindadhanasekaran Muralikrishna, signed up for an account on the matchmaking website to find a partner for his 29-year-old son.
When the victim’s father contacted her through the website, he asked her to call his home number and speak to her mother. However, in 2002, Maleeha’s mother passed away and she lived alone. She masquerades as Kirtan’s mother and gives her approval to Govindadhanasekharan to speak to Kirtan.
Since then, posing as Kirtana, Maleeha has spoken to Govindadhanasekaran via WhatsApp text messages and calls.
She told them that she worked as a consultant at a military base in Australia and was not allowed to use a camera phone. Because of this, he declined her requests for a video call.
She also sent him pictures of her 27-year-old niece, who works for the Singapore Armed Forces, to convince her what Keerthena looked like.
He assures her that Keerthana will marry him when she returns from Australia, adding that her employment contract will expire in May 2019. But when that date came, he further lied that his contract had been extended for three more months.
She also said that her mother was ill and was in the United States with her brother, so she was unable to discuss their marriage with him.
He asked Govindandasekaran for money, after claiming that he needed the cash to help his social work clients. From December 2018 to October 2019, he transferred his SGD 4,750 on a total of four occasions. He also took 1,000 SGD from his father.