SINGAPORE: In 2020, DJ and former actress Jade Rasif had warned an online Mommy group about a sugar baby site she and her young niece saw on YouTube in a post that went viral.
What the public did not know is that in the same year, Sugarbook, founded by a Malaysian man who was later arrested for the content of the site. He had used four of Ms Rasif’s own photos in a collage its advertising shared on Telegram groups, reported AsiaOne recently.
In 2021, Ms Rasif, who is a mum herself, sued Sugarbook’s parent company, Endeavor Standard, in Malaysia.
It was only recently, on her Instagram stories, that she disclosed that the suit had been settled for RM100,000 (S$32,000) in 2023.
She told AsiaOne that Sugarbook had earlier approached her for a collaboration, which she turned down. However, when she was tagged on Instagram, she realized that her photos were being used without her consent or any compensation, together with the hashtags #sugarbaby and #sugardating.
They were then shared on Telegram, and she told AsiaOne that some of the platform’s users would guess in the comments where her income was coming from.
She chose not to make her ordeal public because her career on social media was only just beginning to flourish, and her job as a DJ had all but disappeared during the pandemic. Making noise about what Sugarbook was doing could possibly derail her career, so she kept mum, even though the Sugarbaby website shocked and disgusted her.
Ms Rasif broke her silence to quell rumours once and for all about her source of income.
The legal proceedings took a while because of the pandemic, and according to new IG stories, it took a long while for the company to settle the suit.
“The CEO asked me to please lower my asking (price) because they were ‘just a small company’ so taking pity on them… I agreed to take less,” she wrote in a Story on Sunday (Feb 1).
“Anyway, if you find me on this website, it’s fake,” she added in another.
In 2020, when the ad for a sugar baby site popped up while she was watching a video on YouTube with some children, the caption on the video read: “Becca’s allowance is S$5,000 monthly dating rich men.”
Ms Rasif wrote that the children asked her what a sugar baby is, “and were amazed at how much they could earn.”
She then appealed to mothers to “skip past quickly” if they see the ad on YouTube, adding that she didn’t “need the lifestyle glamourised” for her son and his cousins.
The former DJ later posted a petition on her Facebook page asking YouTube to abide by Singapore’s Advertising Code of Ethics. /TISG
