SINGAPORE — A judge in Singapore on Thursday sentenced a Vietnamese woman to three weeks in jail for livestreaming “obscene acts” from a public area.
According to a report by Channel News Asia, Nguyen Thi Ngoc Lan, 31, was arrested on Sept. 27 for “performing indecent acts in full view of the public.” Her Singaporean husband, Adrian Ching Kah Siang, 36, was arrested for abetting her by serving as her “lookout” and was also sentenced to three weeks in jail.
The arrests were made after residents of a Boon Lay neighborhood apartment building complained to police. Nguyen reportedly set up a mobile phone on a tripod in the building’s “void deck” — an open public area located on the ground floor — and then danced and “performed several obscene acts” for approximately two hours.
Nguyen was reportedly not nude but wore “skimpy outfits” that “exposed her private parts when she moved around.”
Nguyen told the court that she was a regular livestreamer on TikTok as well as MMLive, a Vietnamese app that bills itself as offering “gaming, chatting and livestreaming,” as well as interaction with “beautiful hot girls.”
The prosecution in the case told the court that the area was “highly accessible, visible and had high human traffic.”
Nguyen “effectively manufactured pornography in a public place,” the prosecutor added.
Under Chapter 14, Section 294 of Singapore’s penal code, performing an obscene act in public is punishable by up to three months imprisonment, a fine or both.
Even when their activities are conducted in private, however, content creators and streamers have encountered legal trouble in Singapore as well as in other countries such as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, where obscenity laws remain strict. In 2022, a Singaporean OnlyFans creator was jailed for obscenity. As XBIZ has reported, Police in the Indonesian province of Bali are particularly notorious for arresting influencers and other people making and sharing content online, under Indonesia’s harsh 2008 obscenity law, “Law 44.”
Recurring arrests in these and other countries serve as reminders that adult performers, producers and creators traveling away from their home regions should always be aware of the laws and penalties for the production or distribution of anything that local authorities could consider to be pornographic or obscene.
