Man Caught Taking Up-Skirt Videos Claims He Was Just Testing His Camera

A Singapore product development engineer name Abel Tan Yew Hong, aged 28, has been jailed for 11 weeks after he was caught taking up-skirt videos of women. He claims, however, that the videos were harmless and simply for research.

Hong was caught at Bedok MRT station in September of 2019 after a passerby spotted him taking videos and took him to the station staff, who later called the police.

Upon examining his phone, the police found similar videos taken over the course of months. Videos of 10 women at multiple locations, including Bedok, Serangoon Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) stations, and Suntec City, were recorded on his Sony Xperia mobile phone, reported a Singapore daily, the Straits Times.

On Friday, Deputy Public Prosecutor Goh Qi Shuen urged the court to jail the man for 11 weeks, according to The Straits Times. Hong was found guilty of three counts of insulting the modesty of a woman, along with seven similar charges. His lawyer, Marshall Lim, has asked the court to lessen the sentence by at least one week.

Lim defended Hong by insisting that he was simply taking the videos in order to test the quality of his cellphone camera.

According to Lim, Hong had become interested in up-skirt videos online and noticed some variation in the clips, as some appeared to be of high quality and others appeared to be of very low quality.

"To satisfy his curiosity as to why there was such a variance in the quality of the videos, our client instructs us that he took the unfortunate decision to try taking these videos for himself," said Lim.

"His intention was merely to experiment and to find out if his cellphone camera could take the high-quality videos he saw on the Internet."

Lim also defended Hong's character in the court, insisting he was a well-educated man in a long-term relationship who works for a major international semiconductor company.

"She continues to stand by him and their plans to get married have not changed," said Lim about Hong's girlfriend who has forgiven him, reported the Straits Times.

District Judge Adam Nakhoda said he agreed with the prosecution on the sentence. The accused was somewhat persistent in following victims up the escalators," he said.

Hong was discovered to have followed his victims on escalators, standing behind them, sometimes targeting the same woman multiple times. In one instance at Serangoon MRT station, five days before his crime came to light, he had followed a woman up three escalators to take a video.

Hong is out on bail of $5,000 to settle his personal affairs and was deferred to start his sentence on April 26. For each count of insulting the modesty of a woman, he could have been jailed for up to a year, fined, or both.

In 2019, a man was caught trying to take pictures up skirts of female shoppers in London, and was found with 1,700 similar images on his phone. This was three months after a new law was passed in England stating that up-skirting offenders can receive sentences of up to two years.