A WOMAN identified as Ah Mei, who fabricated documents to evade a prison sentence, surrendered to the court Tuesday after being wanted online for more than a year.

Ah Mei started smuggling brand name mobile phones from Hong Kong in 2012, earning commissions from sellers in Huaqiangbei.

In the year before she was caught in an action by Shenzhen Customs, she smuggled phones at a total market value of HK$30 million (US$3.82 million) and evaded 4 million yuan (US$597,600) worth of taxes.

In August 2013, she was sentenced to five years in jail and fined 200,000 yuan. As she was convicted during a breast-feeding period, she was allowed to temporarily serve her term outside of prison.

In December 2013, Ah Mei provided a certificate of pregnancy and the court approved that she could continue to serve her sentence outside of prison.

However, in the following two years — 2014 and 2015 — Ah Mei provided two birth certificates showing her daughter and son had been born in 2014 and 2015. Her jail term outside of prison was extended to October 2016.

In October 2016, Ah Mei handed in another certificate of pregnancy.

This time the prosecutors suspected the medical certificate was a fake when the court, following standard procedures, sought suggestions from prosecutors before making a final decision.

The prosecutors started a field investigation and found that the two documents were fakes and she wasn’t actually pregnant. Local hospitals also denied having issued the birth certificates.

(Han Ximin, He Mufu)