A 21 year old NSF who is a Singaporean Permanent Resident (PR) from Malaysia pleaded guilty in court today (15 Feb) for threatening his then girlfriend with making her private photos public and also for attempting to scam FoodPanda of $5,456.
Two other charges were taken into consideration against him and he will be back in court for sentencing the following month pending a report to assess if he fits the criteria for probation.
What happened
He was then aged 19 when he asked his then girlfriend to send him private pictures of her even though she was not comfortable with it.
However, she obliged as she trusted him that the photos would only be meant for his private viewing.
All together, he had about 11 of such photos as he had also taken some during his relationship with her.
On 3 June 2020, he raged at her over some text messages which she had and also accused her of cheating on him with her ex boyfriend.
She denied doing so and he called her to continue arguing with her, instructing her to report to the Police that she had been violated by her ex.
She listened to him eventually and reported the case to the Police right after the phone call.
They continued to communicate via text but she stopped replying for a moment and he sent her texts like:
“Jump down alr?”
“Haven’t oh no”
“When u jump down and die”
To which she did not respond.
After another two hours, he realised that she had changed her password on Facebook and called her to find out the reason why while also demanding her to share her new password with him.
She did not answer the phone when he called twice, which resulted in him threatening to send her private photos out.
Police officers visited her at her place of residence to investigate on the alleged violation case which she had earlier reported, and she told them the truth about all the happenings.
Attempted to scam FoodPanda of commissions
Around the same time as the incident above, he also tried to scam FoodPanda of commissions by registering rider accounts with them.
He used the information on the NRICs of the mother of his then girlfriend as well as another individual to register accounts with the Food Delivery company.
He had his own account at that time which was already registered to his e-scooter.
Between the period of 1 June 2020 to 8 June 2020, he accepted 355 orders with the two registered accounts but did not make the deliveries as he wanted FoodPanda to give him the commission.
An employee of FoodPanda then noticed the amount of unfulfilled orders from the accounts and suspended it before making a Police report on the same day.
The man did not manage to receive any commission from the unfulfilled orders in the end.
FoodPanda had however already lost $5,456 from compensating the customers who ordered the food but did not receive their orders with vouchers and also paying the establishments for orders that they have prepared and dispatched.
The man had so far returned $1,100 to FoodPanda.
Defense lawyer’s mitigating plea
The man’s defense lawyer said that what the man did was not reflective of the person he truly is as he will likely be successful in changing for the better due to his performance in school, his sense of responsibility and good attitude.
He had also pledged to return the money loss by FoodPanda regularly and had not made anything from his attempted scam.
As for his behaviour towards his then girlfriend, the defense argued that it was because he lacked dating experience and was sorry for his actions and did not have any intention to cause harm to her.
They also continued to date for another four months after his offences came to light.
The judge after hearing the defense’s mitigation agreed to a probation suitability report before sentencing him.
For his actions of threatening or sending out private images or recordings, he may receive a jail term of up to five years, fined and caned or get any combinations of the three.
Image source: Unsplash.com, FoodPanda/Facebook
