Former SingPost employee jailed for making unauthorised deposits of nearly S$40,000 into her bank account

SINGAPORE — In the span of four hours, a Singapore Post employee made more than a dozen unauthorised transactions to deposit S$39,820 into her bank account using the Nets terminal at the Geylang branch where she worked.

When her boss confronted her about it at the end of the day, Zalinah Mohamed Kadir admitted to doing so in the hopes of getting a loan from an unlicensed moneylender who had instructed her to transfer the money into several bank accounts.

The 41-year-old was sentenced to nine months’ jail on Tuesday (Oct 22) after pleading guilty to a single charge under the Computer Misuse Act. She will begin serving her sentence on Nov 5.

The court heard that she had been working with SingPost for about seven years as a general operations manager. 

She was a postal officer at the time of her offences on March 25.

Responding to TODAY’s queries, SingPost said that it had fired her on March 27.  

“As a public service provider, integrity is a core value we embrace and we do not tolerate dishonest behaviour,” a SingPost spokesperson added.

On the day that the offences took place, Zalinah was manning the counter. As part of her duties, she had to assist customers who wanted to deposit money into their bank accounts through the Nets terminal.

Counter staff would typically receive cash from customers, and count the money before entering the amount into the terminal. 

The staff would then swipe the customer’s bank card at the terminal and ask the customer to enter his PIN, so that the deposit could be processed.

Once this was cleared by the bank, the employee would deposit the cash in the till. 

The cash would be counted at the end of the day to check if it tallied with the deposit transactions made that day at the counter.

SingPost would then credit the money to the relevant banks.

On that day, Zalinah made 14 unauthorised deposit transactions from 1.12pm to 5.14pm, amounting to S$39,820.

But none of the deposits originated from any customer’s requests, nor did any of them hand her any cash. 

What she did was to enter various amounts ranging from S$520 to S$5,000 into the Nets terminal, and inserted her own bank card and keyed in her PIN. 

The money was then deposited into her account.

By the time she finished work for the day, she could not account for the shortfall between the deposits and the amount of cash in her counter.

She initially told the branch manager that the money would be available by the end of the day, but eventually confessed that this was not possible.

The branch manager lodged a police report, while SingPost paid the shortfall to the banks.

Further investigations revealed that Zalinah wanted to borrow S$25,000 from a loanshark — only identified as Jeremy — that day.

Jeremy agreed to give the loan, but only if she transferred money into several bank accounts that he had provided to her and pay a “non-refundable insurance fee” of S$2,520.

She claimed that Jeremy assured her he would transfer the deposits back to her account by the end of the day. 

Because of that, she made all the unauthorised deposits into her own account before transferring the money into Jeremy’s accounts.

But he did not transfer the S$39,820 in deposits back to her, resulting in her not being able to account for the shortfall.

She has since made restitution of S$400. She could have been jailed for up to two years, fined up to S$5,000 or both.