As many ladies can attest, Tinder isn’t exactly the perfect place to find a solid significant other, what with countless accounts of creepy guys and disastrous dates. Here’s a prime example of why one should tread carefully on that dating app (or any others) — a man has been jailed after he was caught taking upskirt videos of his date, The New Paper reported.
Teo Chun Peng met the victim, a 31-year-old analyst, at Republic Plaza for dinner on Dec 16 after arranging a date through Tinder. All was fine till she needed to go back to the office at about 8:10pm. The 29-year-old former bank employee walked ahead of her when they got on a downward escalator and turned around to talk to her, propping his right leg up and placing his phone on it. Sickening issues aside, how is that not conspicuous?
The mobile phone brushed against the victim’s knees and of course she felt something was amiss. She confronted Teo and demanded to check his mobile phone. He then tried to run away and struggled briefly with the victim. He broke free, but she shouted to nearby passers-by to stop him. Eventually, she managed to check his phone and found an upskirt video of her underwear. Needless to say, she called the police.
Teo, now unemployed, also admitted that he took a video of her from under the table as they were having dinner.
He was sentenced to jail for 16 weeks on 10 charges after facing 37 counts of outrage of modesty of a woman. Among the charges, four were for intruding into a female colleague’s privacy at an escalator in an unknown location on Nov 1; he also photographed images of her cleavage while she was bent slightly forward at The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands on Nov 8.
He filmed another 27-year-old colleague four times when they were on an escalator — his favored hunting ground, it seems — and also at a food court on Bayfront Avenue while they were having lunch on Dec 13.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Esther Tang added that his first victim was a colleague of his from a few years ago. She added that he would watch the videos on his phone or computer and delete them after.
Twenty-seven other similar charges were considered during the sentencing. Teo could have been jailed for up to one year on each charge of insulting a woman’s modesty and/or fined.
