MANILA, Philippines — For picking up a lost automated teller machine (ATM) card owned by a Saudi national, an overseas Filipino worker (OFW) was sentenced to five-year incarceration at the Al-Hair jail in Riyadh, the Kingdom’s capital, a Filipino migrant rights watchdog reported on Wednesday.

The 34-year-old OFW from Caloocan City was charged with stealing 75,000 Saudi rials, roughly equivalent to P850,000, from a lost ATM card of a Saudi national which the former found jammed inside the machine when he was about to withdraw an amount from his own card issued by his company for their regular salary.

“According to him, he was tempted and tried to withdraw an amount,” Migrante-Middle East regional coordinator John Leonard Monterona said in a statement. “He was surprised that the ATM released a huge amount.”

Unfortunately, Monterona said the OFW was caught by the bank’s CCTV and he was apprehended on June 9, 2011. He was later sentenced to five-year imprisonment plus a hundred of lashes by a Saudi court.

“He often called me seeking assistance. He requested me to convey to the Philippine Embassy his request to file for a reduction of sentence,” Monterona said.

He claimed that last January 16, he talked with the embassy’s Assistance to the National section head Consul Roussel Reyes discussing the possibility of filing an appeal for a reduction of sentence.

“Consul Reyes explained that it would be very difficult to convince the court to reduce his sentence as the money taken from the ATM card is a huge amount,” said Monterona, claiming that aside from the public liability aspect of the offense, the court may require him to pay the amount to the Saudi national if the latter would decide to claim his money back.

The OFW arrived in Saudi Arabia on April 2009 and worked as a driver for a local services company.