A Filipino domestic worker was sentenced to nine months in prison by a Singapore court after confessing to receiving stolen cash in her bank account in 2014 from a man she met on a dating website.
Shirley Navarrete Nalangan, 52, entered a guilty plea to one count of dishonesty in receiving stolen property when she accepted money transferred into her bank account.
According to The Straits Times, Nalangan began to work in Singapore as a domestic helper in 1990. In 2012, she met Albert Analdez through a dating website.
Analdez told Nalangan that he was from Kentucky, United States. The duo established a relationship and often discussed about “intimate topics” and marriage through the web.
The following year, Analdez asked Nalangan to accept funds as payment to a financing company in Malaysia for him to get his profits from his engineering business. He asked the helper to withdraw the funds from her bank account, and send the money to an employee at the finance agency.
Even though she raised concerns over where the money came from, Nalangan nonetheless gave the man her bank account details. On January 2, 2014, US$105,000 was deposited to her account. Later, it was learned that the money was stolen from a Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce account under the name of Fahmi El Hosseny.
After Nalangan remitted S$4,000 (US$2,989) through a Western Union agent to a woman in Malaysia, she was arrested by the police.
The defendant’s pro bono lawyer, Ng Boon Gan, the appealed for a lighter sentence for the charge that has a maximum penalty of five years in jail plus fine.
Ng Boon Gan, a lawyer representing Nalangan pro bono, pleaded for a lighter penalty. The maximum penalty for dishonestly receiving stolen property is a five-year jail term and a fine.