SINGAPORE — While masquerading as a younger woman on a matchmaking website, 51-year-old Maliha Ramu tricked a man and his father into giving her more than S$5,000 (RM15,908).
Maliha pulled off the ruse by using her relative’s photographs and avoided video calls by saying she worked at an army base overseas and was not allowed to use a camera phone.
Today, Maliha was sentenced to seven months’ jail. She pleaded guilty to two cheating charges, with another three similar counts taken into consideration for sentencing.
She had already served jail time some 15 years ago for similar offences committed in 2006 and 2007, involving much larger sums of money. In one case, she befriended victims in India and Australia, promising to marry them but cheating them of S$225,000 instead.
The court heard that at the time of her latest offences, she was widowed and self-employed.
In November 2018, the father of her victim, Govindandhanasekaran Murallikrishna, signed up for an account on matchmaking website Tamil Matrimony to find a partner for his son.
Maliha had set up a fictitious profile for a 25-year-old single woman named Keerthana on the website. When the victim’s father contacted her, she asked him to call a home number and speak to her mother.
However, Maliha’s mother had died in 2002 and she lived alone. Because of that, she pretended she was Keerthana’s mother and gave her approval for Govindandhanasekaran to “speak” to Keerthana.
From then on, posing as Keerthana, Maliha spoke to Govindandhanasekaran — a 29-year-old Indian national — through WhatsApp text messages and calls.
She told them that she worked as a counsellor at an army base in Australia and was not allowed to use a camera phone. Because of that, she rejected his requests for video calls.
She also sent him photographs of her 27-year-old niece-in-law, who works for the Singapore Armed Forces, to lead him to believe this was what Keerthena looked like.
She gave her niece-in-law’s National Registration Identity Card (NRIC) number to him at his request, and occasionally sent gifts such as headphones and medicine for his father.
She led him to believe that Keerthana would marry him when she returned from Australia, saying that her employment contract would end in May 2019. But when that date came around, she further lied that her contract had been extended for three more months.
In August 2019, she said she had been promoted to the acting head of her department until November.
She also said her mother was sick and was in the United States with her brother, so she was unable to discuss their wedding with them.
ATM transaction triggered suspicion
Soon, she asked Govindandhanasekaran for money after claiming she needed cash to help her social work clients.
From December 2018 to October 2019, he transferred her S$4,750 in total over four occasions. This was purportedly for medicine, funeral expenses, and money for the Deepavali festivities for her clients.
She used it for her personal expenses, housing rental and utility bills, and renewal of pawn tickets.
When Govindandhanasekaran returned to India in December 2019, Maliha told his father that she needed money to settle some payments. The older man then gave her S$1,000 which she used to pay interest on a loan she had taken from a friend.
Maliha then made repayment of S$2,000 to Govindandhanasekaran from an automated teller machine at Bukit Panjang Plaza.
Upon seeing this transfer, he grew suspicious. He then discovered Maliha’s niece-in-law’s profile on Facebook and realised she had uploaded the same photographs that Maliha sent him.
Discovering that Maliha’s niece-in-law was already married and someone was posing as her, he got the address of her parents’ boutique shop in Chua Chu Kang.
He visited the shop and confirmed with them that no such person named Keerthana existed. When he played a voice recording for them, they identified it as Maliha’s voice.
He then lodged a police report in January 2020.
Maliha could have been jailed for up to 10 years and fined for each cheating charge. — TODAY
