3 Filipinas, 1 local woman found guilty of laundering money from love scam

 

Police display items seized from scam syndicates (File)

Three Filipina domestic helpers and a local woman working as a waitress were immediately taken behind bars yesterday, July 17, after they were all convicted of “dealing in property known or believed to be proceeds of indictable offense,” otherwise known as money laundering.

Found guilty of one count each of the charge were Wong Siu-kuen, 53 years old, Marife Dionson, 43; Geraldine Tolentino, 38; and Ires Calinawagan, 40. They will be sentenced on July 30, after background reports on them are submitted to court.

Eastern Magistrate Minnie Wat disregarded the four defendants’ claim that they had no knowledge of the huge sums that passed through their respective bank accounts between June and August 2020, which were traced to money transfers made by a love scam victim.

TAWAG NA!

Magistrate Wat said that while the accused did not make the illicit bank transfers themselves, it was enough that they gave up control over their accounts, which facilitated the money laundering.

She said “bank accounts are valuable personal properties” which should be guarded at all costs. In any normal course of event, she said holders of such accounts should be held accountable for all transactions made through them.

The magistrate noted that all of the defendants had signed up to get their monthly bank statements by mail, so they could not deny any knowledge of the large sums that were deposited into their accounts, then hurriedly withdrawn.

In Wong’s case in particular, two bank statements were even found inside her handbag when she was arrested.

In any case, the magistrate said she found the defendants’ statements as to how their accounts ended up being used for illegal purposes not credible.

Wong was found guilty of letting her Hang Seng Bank account be the depository for $776,460 between June 15 and Aug. 20, 2020.

Dionson was found to have allowed her HSBC account to be used to launder proceeds of a crime, when a total of $358,300 passed through it between 8^th and 9^th of July 2020.

Tolentino was likewise found guilty of allowing her HSBC account to host $566,438 in crime earnings between 15^th and 20^th of July 2020.

In Calinawagan’s case, her HSBC account was used to launder a total of $714,406 between 10^th and 23^rd of July 2020.

They were all declared complicit in the crime, despite claiming that they had merely lent their ATM cards to another person, or that in the case of the fourth defendant, that she lost it shortly after she opened her bank account.

According to the prosecution, the money that went to the defendants' bank accounts had come from a total of $1,850,265 that a local woman working as a secretary lost to a man named "Zhang" who became her online boyfriend for five months in 2020.

The victim surnamed Wong, told the court she transferred some $1.6 million from her Bank of China accounts to various accounts of unknown people after someone claiming to be from a courier company told her she needed to pay some fees for a package sent to her by Zhang.

Later, she was also charged for "interest payments" as the package supposedly contained a large amount of cash.

Earlier, a fourth Filipina who was also accused of allowing her bank account to be used to launder proceeds from the same love scam, was sent to jail for eight months after admitting the charge.

Maila Samson, 50 years old, was meted the sentence by Magistrate Wat, despite her lawyer pleading for a lighter punishment.

Using the usual starting point of 12 months in jail, the magistrate only allowed the standard one-third discount for the defendant’s guilty plea.

This could indicate that all the four other defendants would be given this standard sentence as they opted to go to trial instead of admitting guilt at the outset.

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