Ex-SingPost worker jailed for $40k misuse of Nets terminal
A former Singapore Post (SingPost) postal officer was sentenced to nine months' jail yesterday for performing unauthorised transactions of almost $40,000 with a Nets terminal machine.
Yesterday, Zalinah Mohamed Kadir, 41, pleaded guilty to an offence under the Computer Misuse Act.
She was a postal officer attached to the Geylang Branch and had been working at SingPost for about seven years as a general operations officer.
As part of her counter duties, she would assist customers to deposit money into their bank accounts through the Nets terminal machine.
The customer would go to the counter with the physical cash to be deposited and staff would enter the amount into the Nets machine.
The staff member would then swipe the customer's card and ask him to enter his personal identification number (PIN) for the deposit to be processed.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Sruthi Boppana said the cash is tallied at the end of the workday against the deposit transactions made in the course of the day at the counter, in order to ensure that there is no shortfall.
The money is then credited by SingPost to the banks.
But in March, Zalinah performed 14 unauthorised transactions into her bank account using the Nets terminal machine she was working at within a span of four hours.
She entered the amounts into the machine, inserted her own card and keyed in her PIN though there was no corresponding physical cash.
She did so because she wanted to borrow $15,000 from an unlicensed moneylender known as Jeremy she had previously taken loans from.
He agreed to provide the loan on the condition she transferred money into the accounts he provided. Zalinah transferred the money from her account to the accounts provided by him.
Although Jeremy agreed to transfer the money back to her account, she was forced to come clean about her deeds to her branch manager when Jeremy failed to do so.
Zalinah has made restitution of $400. SingPost suffered a loss of $39,820 as it had to pay the shortfall to the relevant banks.
Yesterday, a SingPost spokesman told The New Paper that Zalinah had been dismissed on March 27.
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