Aidah’s two daughters were aged 19 and 18 at the time of the offences, and have already been sentenced to reformative training for their roles in the scheme.
Although the term was not used in court documents, the family were effectively “money mules” for criminals involved in scams.
Legislative changes to make it easier for the authorities to target money mules were flagged in Parliament in February.
WHAT HAPPENED
The court heard that Aidah had been seeking individuals on dating mobile applications and sharing her family’s financial difficulties, “in hopes of getting their sympathies”.
She would ask them for money and promised to help them in return.
Sometime between November 2020 and December 2020, Aidah got to know two men she knew only as Raymond and Kelvin through online dating mobile application Tagged.
Raymond was supposedly residing in Sydney, Australia or in the United Kingdom, and was purportedly both a medical doctor and a property agent.
Kelvin was supposedly an Australian living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and had a money-changing business there. Aidah regarded both men as her boyfriends.
Both Raymond and Kelvin separately offered her the opportunity to earn money by providing them with new or existing bank accounts at a rate of S$200 per bank account.
The men also sought her help to duplicate debit cards to be delivered to addresses nominated by them.
Aidah agreed to both proposals and introduced her son, Riduan, and two daughters, Nur Syafiqah Mohamad Awal and Nur Atiqah Mohamad Awal, to her two “boyfriends”.
Her children then opened bank accounts and duplicated debit cards, which Aidah stored for safekeeping before delivering them to Raymond and Kelvin in Malaysia via courier.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Matthew Choo said that “voluminuous overseas cash withdrawals”, including some in Malaysia, were performed on these accounts.
The prosecution added that Aidah had reasonable grounds to believe that Raymond and Kelvin were engaged in criminal conduct, and that arrangements involving them, herself and her children had facilitated the duo’s control of funds they gained from criminal conduct.
DPP Choo noted that Aidah had been warned by the police in 2019 following her involvement in a love scam, where she had given control of her bank account to an individual she had met online.
And when she had introduced one of her daughters to Kelvin to get her to handover accounts to him, the authorities were already probing similar arrangements made with Raymond and she was specifically warned not to give control of bank accounts to unknown individuals.
Nevertheless, Aidah and her children gave control of 27 bank accounts in total to Raymond and Kelvin, with 20 of them established to have received criminal proceeds from various scams.
Between December 2020 and May 2021, the police had received at least 50 reports from victims who had lost money to scams. The victims were deceived into transferring money directly or indirectly to Aidah’s or her children’s accounts.
In Riduan’s case, an account he handed over to Raymond received S$10,970 in total in April and May 2021.
Besides receiving S$600 for handing over three accounts, Riduan had used over S$5,000 of the money transferred into one of the accounts for his own personal expenses.
Describing the case as “tragic”, Mr Choo said: “The mother had led her three children to a life of crime and brought irreversible consequences to them.”
He added: “She and her children had allowed a transnational criminal syndicate to launder around S$1.5 million. All of the victims’ hard-earned money will be forever lost to these scams.”
