Jail for woman over conspiracy to unlawfully transport $450k to S'pore, cash turned out to be fake

Straits Times

16-05-2025

Jail for woman over conspiracy to unlawfully transport $450k to S'pore, cash turned out to be fake
SINGAPORE – Two Indonesian women worked together in a plan to bring cash totalling $450,000 into Singapore without informing the authorities, but the 45 pieces of $10,000 notes later turned out to be counterfeit.
One of the women, Sofia Martha, 51, was sentenced to two months' jail on May 15 after she pleaded guilty to one count of engaging in a conspiracy to move into the country more than $20,000 in cash without alerting the Singapore authorities in January.
The case involving her alleged accomplice, Col Vinna, 33, is pending.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Michelle Tay told the court that the cross-border cash reporting procedure is intended to be a tool of detection and prevention.
She added: 'Its purpose is to guard against Singapore's financial system from being abused by insidious criminal syndicates for money laundering and other illicit purposes.'
She said Sofia could not credibly substantiate the source of the notes and had given officers from Singapore's Commercial Affairs Department inconsistent accounts on why they were brought into the country.
She initially told them that a man known only as Mr Purwatnomo had asked her to help him change the orchid series of the Singapore dollar notes to rupiah.
She claimed that there was no agreement for her to earn any commissions for helping him.
But in her second statement, Sofia said she wanted to bring the notes to Singapore to sell as they were 'an old series of currency notes worth more than their face value'.
She recanted her earlier account, stating that the plan was not to exchange the notes to rupiah.
'The accused stated that she had agreed with Mr Purwatnomo that the profit she earned from selling the notes would be used to set up an oil and gas trading company in Singapore, at Jurong Island,' said DPP Tay.
However, Sofia later stated that Mr Purwatnomo had given her the notes as an 'investment' for her to open a company here, and that he also let her decide if she wanted to change the money to rupiah.
She claimed that she agreed to exchange the money and contacted a friend , known only as 'Saleh' to ask him if he had any contacts who could help her.
According to Sofia, he introduced her to Col and the two women spoke for the first time via a video call on Jan 2.
The DPP said the pair agreed that Col would receive a commission of $12,000 if she succeeded in exchanging the money.
On Jan 2, Sofia and Col met in a Jakarta hotel at around 10.30pm.
The next day, Sofia handed Col 45 pieces of the notes . They boarded a plane and arrived in Singapore at around 8.30am on Jan 3.
The DPP said Col tried to deposit the money at banks in Singapore, with plans to later withdraw the cash in smaller denominations. Court documents do not disclose the identities of the people who owned the bank accounts.
The court heard that when she failed to do so, she engaged a Singaporean friend's help to open a bank account and deposit three of the $10,000 notes.
When the friend tried to deposit the cash, bank officers saw that the notes looked unusual and the police were alerted.
All 45 pieces of the notes turned out to be counterfeit and officers seized them from Col, who had accompanied her friend to the bank branch that day.
Court documents do not disclose what happened next but Sofia and Col were charged in court later.
On May 15, DPP Tay urged the court to sentence Sofia to two months' jail, adding: 'If the offence was completed, it would in fact have brought counterfeit notes of a significant amount... into circulation in Singapore, and would have resulted in the laundering of those counterfeit notes.'
The prosecutor also said that Sofia had outsourced the risk to someone else, stressing that even though she might not have known that the money was counterfeit, her c ulpabilit y was high in attempting to bring notes of a suspicious nature into Singapore.
Shaffiq Alkhatib is The Straits Times' court correspondent, covering mainly criminal cases heard at the State Courts.
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