SINGAPORE – A woman ordered to undergo a mandatory treatment order (MTO) in 2019 after she assisted a love scammer re-offended five years later when she became involved in a similar ruse.
Offenders sentenced to an MTO have to undergo treatment to address their mental conditions in lieu of time behind bars.
For her latest offence, Christina Cheong Yoke Lin met a man online in 2024, and her bank account later received over $38,000, including at least $2,000 in proceeds from a love scam.
Cheong, 70, who has made no restitution, was sentenced to 10 weeks’ jail on July 13 after pleading guilty to an offence involving the benefits of criminal conduct.
In 2017, she allowed a love scammer to use her bank account but decided to keep $50,000 of the cash – proceeds from a love scam – for herself.
She was later found to be suffering from a major depressive disorder and was sentenced to an 18-month MTO in 2019 for dishonestly misappropriating the money.
In the current case, a person known only as “Liam” contacted Cheong via Instagram on Sept 16, 2024, claiming to be an engineer working on an oil rig.
They started chatting on messaging platform Telegram daily, and the person appeared to show care and concern for her.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Kenley Kwan said: “He told her that he would like to come to Singapore to be with her after settling outstanding matters at his company. She came to believe that he was a romantic partner.”
In November 2024, Liam asked Cheong to help open an account with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and receive money from his company so that he could “fund repairs on the oil rig”.
He told her that he could not receive the funds as he had no access to a local bank account while he was on the rig.
Cheong believed his claims and agreed to help him.
She opened a Coinbase account in her own name and sent him information including the login credentials.
Liam later asked her to use her bank account to receive funds from unknown parties, whom he claimed were friends and secretaries working in his company.
After Cheong received the money, he would call her within 15 minutes to instruct her to transfer the funds to the Coinbase account and purchase Bitcoin.
He would then access the Coinbase account and transfer the Bitcoin to other unknown cryptocurrency accounts within the same day.
The DPP said when Cheong entered into this arrangement, “she failed to take reasonable steps to ascertain the source of the monies received in the (bank) account”.
“She had reasonable grounds to believe that the arrangement was related to an unknown person’s benefits from criminal conduct,” he said.
From Dec 11 to 16, 2024, her bank account received more than $38,000 in total over seven transactions.
At least $2,000 of this amount was found to be laundered criminal proceeds obtained from a victim linked to a love scam.
Within the same period, Cheong transferred $38,000 from the bank account to other accounts over four transactions.
Court documents did not disclose how her offence came to light, but her bank account was frozen on Dec 22 that year.
She was arrested in November 2025.
