Jail for woman who submitted bogus travel insurance claims, got S$14,000 in payouts

SINGAPORE — Around a span of 3 yrs, Siti Saliha Muhammad Hussain managed to fraudulently get about S$14,000 in payouts from various insurers these kinds of as AXA, AIG and NTUC Cash flow.

She did this by exploiting the checks and balances for these types of statements that she considered were being lax, a courtroom listened to on Friday (July 29).

Among the other approaches, she lied that her sister’s luggage and laptop had been damaged throughout a trip abroad, and that her mom and schoolmate experienced been robbed.

She also falsified flight tickets, receipts and other supporting files for her scheme, which she retained a top secret from her relatives.

On Friday (July 29), the 30-year-outdated Singaporean was sentenced in a district court to five months’ jail.

She pleaded responsible to six counts of dishonest, with another 14 rates taken into thought for sentencing.

She has considering the fact that produced entire restitution to the six insurance plan organizations she cheated.

The court docket read that Siti manufactured 20 fraudulent statements from them in between March 2016 and September 2019. She obtained 17 payouts amounting to S$14,372.

Her offences sooner or later arrived to light when the insurers located some of her promises suspicious and carried out inner investigations. They then submitted law enforcement experiences from her.

HOW THE Scheme Worked

In one occasion, Siti, her two sisters and her mother took a household journey to Kuala Lumpur in September 2016. Siti aided them to get travel insurance policy guidelines with AXA and AIG.

Court docket files stated that throughout the trip, the family’s Dunlop luggage bag, which they experienced purchased for all-around S$200 in 2010, was destroyed while staying retrieved from the baggage claim conveyor belt at Kuala Lumpur Global Airport.

Siti then recalled a previous inflated assert she experienced created for a family members vacation previously this calendar year for their weakened baggage.

At the time, she was not requested to give supporting receipts in purchase to obtain more substantial payouts. She then felt this was one more possibility to exploit the insurers.

Soon after hunting on-line, she identified images of a stained Louis Vuitton branded baggage bag and a receipt for it valued at HKD$7,700 (S$1,353).

She used these images to file a false assert below her sister’s title with AXA, declaring that her sister experienced found non-removable stains on her luggage which was no for a longer time coated underneath warranty.

She also built the identical assert with AIG underneath her have identify and plan.

AXA disbursed S$300 to her sister’s bank account, which Siti experienced accessibility to, although AIG disbursed S$500 through a cheque.

Soon later on, she resolved to submit far more claims about the exact baggage bag to AXA and AIG below her other sister’s identify. This time, she employed a receipt for a luggage bag from the Tumi brand, which she realized was usually much more costly.

The two insurers disbursed S$950 in total.

Siti then made the decision to make recurring fraudulent vacation insurance plan claims whenever the prospect introduced alone. She also acquired travel coverage procedures to make fake claims even when no abroad excursions were being prepared.

When she unintentionally misplaced her wallet and Iphone throughout a trip to Tokyo, Japan, she lodged a phony law enforcement report that another person had stolen the items.

She realized that her AXA insurance policies plan did not compensate decline ensuing from particular carelessness.

She then built a phony insurance policies claim stating that her Apple iphone and S$5,000 income ended up stolen. She also lied that her Lenovo Notepad laptop experienced been filched, since she understood there was a S$400 cap on the payout she could receive for losing particular money.

AXA disbursed S$2,288 to her.

When her sister went to Krabi, Thailand in mid-2017, Siti retrieved her sibling’s flight departure ticket and designed a assert for S$1,988, professing her baggage bag and laptop computer had been broken.

Siti also searched on the net for sample altering and house irregularity stories, then amended them to contain false particulars of the alleged problems.

She submitted these edited studies, along with images she discovered on line of a harmed luggage bag and laptop, to MSIG. The insurer disbursed S$1,500.

In February 2019, she submitted a declare to AXA declaring that her mom had been robbed of S$600 and her Iphone though on a trip to Pekanbaru, Indonesia. Her mom experienced, in reality, not travelled there at all.

She uncovered an impression of a boarding pass from the spending budget airline Scoot, altering it to involve her mother’s identify. She also attained a sample of an Indonesian police report and amended it to look like her mom had lodged a report in excess of a theft.

AXA disbursed S$1,415 to her.

‘IRONIC’ TO Declare HER Situations Have been DIRE: Choose

Deputy Community Prosecutor Angela Ang sought 5 to 7 months’ jail, arguing that Siti had shown distinct arranging and premeditation given the lengths she went to.

Ms Yamuna Balakrishnan, Siti’s defence counsel, requested for a high-quality alternatively since heading to prison intended she could not be a breadwinner for her household.

The attorney explained to the court in her mitigation plea that her shopper will come from “an really lousy financial background”. Siti experienced committed the offences “in desperate need of money” to pay back for her family’s medical bills, the lawyer said.

Ms Balakrishnan stated that Siti’s father abandoned the family members in 2000. Her mom is visually impaired, and 1 of her sisters give up her occupation after staying diagnosed with glaucoma, which can bring about eyesight loss and blindness through injury to the optic nerve at the back of the eye. 

“She acknowledges that what she did was illegal, but she pleads for leniency,” Ms Balakrishnan included.

Nonetheless, Principal District Judge Luke Tan stated that there was absolutely nothing exceptional about her family situation that made it a applicable mitigating factor.

“It’s definitely rather ironic, wanting at the facts of the case where by counsel highlighted that the accused was in such glaring dire instances. And still, these offences arose as a outcome of journey overseas,” the decide explained to the court docket.

Siti will start off serving her sentence on Sept 1 and remains out on bail.

For every single dishonest offence, she could have been jailed for up to three yrs or fined, or both of those.