A 34-year-old Malaysian man has been sentenced to four months' jail on Jul. 12 for secretly filming his employer's wife and daughter using the toilet at his workplace.
Gunasegaran Pual, a mechanic, committed the crimes from April to July 2022 in the workshop he worked at, utilising two mobile phones and two recording devices to record and watch his victims while they used the toilet.
The workshop had one common toilet that was used by both clients and employees, and had a squatting pan instead of a toilet bowl.
What happened
In April 2022, Pual hid a recording device on the toilet floor of his workshop by using the anti-slip floor covering to conceal it.
The phone leaned against the right wall of the toilet, with the lens facing the squatting pan in a slight upward tilt.
He did this at least three times, according to court documents.
Device found
Some time in May that year, Pual's employer's daughter found the recording device while she was using the toilet and gave it to her mother, who performed administrative tasks at the workshop.
The mother kept the device, which contained 71 videos.
But she could not view the recordings.
Seven of the videos showed people relieving themselves in the toilet or washing their hands, court documents said.
None of these videos captured the victims' faces.
Black phone found
A month later in June, while using the toilet, the workshop's owner's wife noticed a pair of pants hanging behind the toilet door, with a black phone in its pocket. The phone's recording function was switched on.
She realised the phone belonged to Pual as he was looking for it.
She then confronted him, and Pual begged her not to take action against him.
The victim agreed, but kept his phone.
Court documents revealed that 14 videos were found in the phone, of which three were of the victim using the toilet.
There were also recordings of Pual placing the phone in position and checking its angle, and one recording of him squatting over the squat pan, so as to preview how a potential victim would look like in the video.
In addition, there were also 74 screenshots from various recorded videos of the wife using the toilet, which showed her in various states of undress, including moments where she was removing or pulling her underwear up or down.
Pual's violations were egregious as even though the victim gave him a second chance after that incident, Pual did not learn his lesson.
Another device found
In July, Pual placed another recording device in the toilet between 20 and 30 times.
The victim noticed him behaving suspiciously in the toilet, and decided to check the toilet. There, she found another recording device placed on a rack, together with washing liquids.
This time she did not confront the man and kept the device.
While the SD card of the device was corrupted and thus no videos or images could have been extracted from it, Pual admitted to having used a phone to view the videos on it.
In the abovementioned phone, there were seven images of the wife relieving himself.
Pual's employment was terminated in August 2022, and a police report was made in Oct. 15 that year.
He pleaded guilty to three charges of voyeurism and was sentenced to four months' jail.
Top photo from Unsplash