Woman Jailed For Secretly Filming Other Women At A Gym's Female Changing Room
She has been sentenced to 30 weeks’ jail on 2 May.
By Tang Ruxyn — 03 May 2017, 12:07 PM
A Singaporean woman who used her phone to secretly film other women in changing rooms has been sentenced to 30 weeks in jail yesterday, 2 May
Heng Li Ying, a National University of Singapore (NUS) graduate, admitted that she intruded into the privacy of a Caucasian woman and two unknown women at a gym in Singapore in April 2014.
She had secretly filmed them in the nude or in lingerie using her iPhone 5S in Suntec City Mall’s True Fitness outlet's female changing room.
The marketing executive's offences were discovered by the management of True Fitness who found those obscene videos advertised online. Following that, True Fitness lodged a police report and the authorities managed to trace Heng.
On top of filming the unsuspecting victims, the 29-year-old had sold the indecent footages for SGD0.10 (RM0.31) or SGD0.20 (RM0.62) per second
Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Winston Man revealed that Heng had signed up for a two-year membership at True Fitness in 2012, which gave her access to any the True Fitness outlets across Singapore.
Heng had difficulties holding a permanent job some time in early 2014. She then resorted to creating an account on an online adult forum with the username "gargar787" to advertise and sell videos that depicted women in various states of undress.
To do this, she created a discussion thread labelled "Changing room peektures" on Sammyboy, an online forum with sections that allow users to post and exchange sexually explicit material.
Heng reportedly offered free explicit videos to buyers as a form of promotion to boost her sales.
According to media reports, Heng made SGD1,540 (RM,4772) in about five months by selling the videos to at least 22 users from the forum.
Heng had gone to great lengths just to get those "extremely intrusive" videos
In an incident that took place on 26 April 2014, Heng had filmed a female victim while she was drying her body at the gym's changing room in Suntec City Mall.
It was revealed that Heng had changed position several times from different angles "in order to maximise the quality of the video by capturing [the victim] in her most exposed state".
According to DPP Man, she managed to capture the victim's private parts from the front, back and side.
On that same day, Heng took more compromising videos of another victim who had just left the shower.
Both the videos were sold to users on Sammyboy.
Channel News Asia reported that Heng pleaded guilty to three counts, with another three taken into consideration during sentencing yesterday
"She was charged with three counts of intruding upon the privacy of her victims with the intent to insult their modesty by using her phone to record a video of them in states of undress," a Yahoo News report read.
DPP Man had urged the court to sentence Heng to at least 32 weeks' jail, but her lawyer, Rajan Supramaniam, came to her defence and said that his client has shown "genuine remorse, shame and regret" for her actions.
Rajan stressed that Heng only committed the offences because she was having financial issues after she failed to secure any long-term permanent job for seven years.
Heng could have been jailed for up to a year and/or fined for each charge of insulting the modesty of a woman.