Staff At Mosque Gets Jail For Stealing $38,000 From Mosque Within 2 Years

A: Hey B, if we’re in need of some quick cash, why don’t we just steal from someone?

B: Hmm, I don’t know A, maybe because we don’t want to get caught and then go to jail and have a permanent mark on us for the rest of our lives?

A: Good point.

This lady did not get the memo.

Staff At Mosque Gets Jail For Stealing $38,000 From Mosque Within 2 Years

A woman who was a staff at a mosque stole a whopping $38,000 between 2017 and 2019 from her workplace.

Since you are reading this article, you’ve probably figured out that she did not get away with it.

She was sentenced to one count of criminal breach of trust by a servant, and another two similar charges were considered.

For her crimes, the 36-year-old woman named Marlina Abdul Rahman was given a total of nine months of jail.

Cried In Court & Revealed That She Was Pregnant

Marlina pled guilty to the offences, broke down and cried in court. She also revealed to the judge that she recently found out that she was expecting a baby.

She worked at the mosque as a corporate service officer, and the mosque in question was Darul Aman Mosque in 1 Jalan Eunos.

A few months after she began working at the Mosque, she started to steal money.

She was tasked with collecting payments from religious institutions, gathering donations from the public, fees for using mosque facilities and payments for religious classes.

Timeline of theft:

• March 2017 – November 2017: Stole $15,000
• January 2018 – November 2018: Stole $12,770
• January 2019 – July 2019: $10,195

The Discovery

It was a corporate and estate manager at the mosque who noticed that $4,800 was missing from the money collected by the mosque during Hari Raya Haji in August 2019.

She quickly checked the receipts and the mosque’s accounting system only to realise that Marlina had issued 219 manual receipts, which was supposed to only be used as a back-up if the accounting system was not working.

After further checks, she found that 155 of the 219 manual receipts hadn’t been registered in the accounting system, and nine of the 64 manual receipts that had been registered were recorded with smaller amounts in the system.

So what happened to the money?

Well, Marlina spent it on herself and her family.

At the end of it all, she stole a total of $37,877.50 from the mosque but has repaid $4,800.