Graveyard fraudster jailed again

A SERIAL fraudster, who trawls graveyards to find identities to steal so he can travel overseas using their passports, has again been jailed.

Peter Anthony Short has been jailed again. The image Short supplied for a passport showed him “wearing a wig and synthetic facial features”.

A SERIAL fraudster, who trawls graveyards to find identities to steal so he can travel overseas using their passports, has again been jailed.

Peter Anthony Short, 69, an aged pensioner from Molendinar, was sentenced to five years in jail in the District Court in Brisbane in March for defrauding Centrelink by assuming the identity of dead man Barry Allan Eldridge, who died in 1984.

Short, who has previously worked as a drummer and a mechanic, admitted he pocketed $159,431 from Centrelink by receiving an aged pension in the name of Eldridge for eight years until he was finally busted in 2016.

He pleaded guilty to obtaining financial advantage by deception and was ordered to repay the money.

He was also sentenced in March to 18 months jail after he pleaded guilty to assuming the identity of John Gregory Roche who died in 1968, and using it to try to get a passport in March 2016.

The image Short supplied for the passport showed Short “wearing a wig and synthetic facial features”, and the photo had been digitally manipulated in a bid to trick the high tech “facial recognition software” used by authorities, the court heard.

When police forensics officers examined the passport application they found Short’s fingerprints on it, the court heard.

Police surveillance officers busted Short after they watched a post office and saw his friend pick up the passport and take it back it to his house in Loganholme.

Short pleaded guilty to making a false or misleading statement regarding Australian travel documents and to fraudulently obtaining an Australian travel document at a hearing before

District court judge Jennifer Rosengren on March 3.

He was also sentenced to three months in prison for three charges including uttering a forged document and two counts of impersonation of a dead person; and to one year’s jail for three counts of fraud.

Short was on a disability pension from 1988 until 2013 for a spinal disorder, lower limb deficiencies and physical impairment.

He is now on an aged pension.

Short was in prison since April 2016 when he was apprehended in Rochedale on a return to prison warrant. The 574 days he has already served was taken into account when he was sentenced to the five years jail for the Centrelink fraud, meaning he only needed to serve a short stint in prison.

It is not the first time Short has pulled such a brazen crime.

In 2011 in Brisbane Magistrates Court, Magistrate Noel Nunan told Short he had “thumbed your nose at the system” by going on the run from authorities for nine years, delaying his sentencing on 60 charges related to identity crimes he committed in 2001 and 2002.

In that case he assumed the identity’s of six dead people by finding graves of people about his own age and then slowly acquiring their identity by gathering utility and bank records, then birth certificates and then a passport.

Magistrate Nunan said Short was using the passports to travel to the Philippines for sex.