'Need-money-for-surgery' con: Woman dupes victims of $18,250
She found it effective to show her victims her IC.
By Amanda Phua
The New Paper
Friday, Jun 22, 2012
For years, Nur Farra Jamil used the same ruse and people kept falling for it.
Starting as a 17-year-old mum in 1998, she duped nine strangers of $3,760. She was jailed eight weeks that year.
Since then, Nur Farra has been jailed for a total of 11 years and seven months on 22 cheating charges, one charge of possessing someone else's IC unlawfully, and one of possessing stolen property. Another 46 more were taken into consideration during sentencing.
Two weeks after she was released last November, she was at it again.
Yesterday, Nur Farra was hauled back to court. She pleaded guilty to three charges of cheating, with seven others being taken into consideration.
She swindled $18,250 from the three victims.
Her modus operandi was similar throughout. In 1998, she claimed that her mother needed money for surgery. Later, she said it was her husband.
She provided the victims with a phone number and an address which was initially false. She later found it more effective to show them her IC.
She went to Jurong East MRT station on Nov 15 and met Mr Yong Chee Seng, 48, a cleaner. Feeding him with her lies, she managed to convince him to part with $17,000.
Second victim
Her second victim was Mr Soh Boon Keong, 20. On Feb 18, she approached him on Yishun Ring Road with the same lies.
He passed her $750 but realised his folly when he looked her up on the Internet later and found an article on her previous cheating cases.
On April 23, she approached Mr Goyal Sahi, 23, an Indian national, at Heartland Mall in Kovan and got $600 out of him.
Nur Farra wrote a mitigation letter while in remand saying she committed the crimes because her mother needed eye surgery.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Sanjiv Vaswani told the court he was not comfortable with her mitigation as it was too similar to her modus operandi.
District Judge Eddy Tham gave her the benefit of doubt and adjourned the case for the prosecution to ascertain if she was telling the truth.
He told her: "I am giving the prosecution a chance to verify your mitigation plea, to see if you produced lies to seek compassion.
"Your first victim is a cleaner who parted with $17,000. Think of the suffering you caused to another person who will not see a single cent of his hard-earned savings returned.
"No matter what difficulty you are in, enough is enough."
This article was first published in The New Paper.
Or is it because she is cha boh? 
