SINGAPORE: After getting to know a teacher who bought items from her Beach Road shops for his National Cadet Corps (NCC) students, a woman lured him into placing large investments with her for a non-existent business.
Over about five months in 2015, the teacher gave S$145,500 (US$108,300) to the woman for her supposed business supplying military items to the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) eMart, which sells army goods to servicemen.
Jahabar Nachia Mohamed Abdullah, 67, was sentenced to two years and four months’ (28 months) jail on Wednesday (Aug 2) for her crimes. She had claimed trial but was found guilty of 10 charges of cheating.
To date, she has only made restitution of S$7,200 to the victim.
The court heard that the victim, Mr Kasmuri Hambali, was an English teacher in charge of the co-curricular activity of NCC at his school.
He got to know the accused, Jahabar, in the year 2000 when he bought items from her shops at Beach Road for his NCC students.
In 2015, Jahabar asked Mr Kasmuri if he wanted to do business, saying she had been supplying military goods to SAF eMart “for a very long time”, but wanted to increase her capital so she could buy more items to supply to SAF eMart.
Mr Kasmuri decided to invest in the business, as he believed that Jahabar’s business was doing well, and Jahabar claimed that it was a “fast turnover business”.
She promised to give him some share of the profits.
Mr Kasmuri began giving Jahabar “investments” by cash or cheque, with the agreement that he was to receive his investments back on top of any small profits.
However, after giving Jahabar a total of S$145,500 in investments between March and September 2015, he did not get any money back.
When he asked Jahabar for the payments, the woman would keep delaying. Eventually, Kasmuri lodged a police report in November 2015.
He later said that if he knew there was no such business supplying goods to the SAF eMart, he would not have given Jahabar all those payments.
At trial, Jahabar claimed that Mr Kasmuri’s payments were “loans” extended to her to help her fulfil customers’ orders at her Beach Road shop.
She claimed that three overseas customers failed to pay her as promised, and therefore she was unable to repay Mr Kasmuri.
The prosecution charged that Jahabar was “not a witness of truth, constantly changing her version of events to suit her case”.
The prosecutor asked for at least three years’ jail for Jahabar, citing a “disturbing growth in the prevalence of scams”, with about 31,700 cases in 2022 compared with about 9,500 in 2019.
In particular, the police identified investment scams as one of the top five types of scams in Singapore in 2022, said the prosecutor.
For each charge of cheating, Jahabar could have been jailed for up to 10 years and fined.