ACT Supreme Court sentences former Australia Post delivery driver Harjeet Singh over phone scam
A delivery driver has learned his fate after claiming he was recruited to a scam, which compromised two telecommunications giants, by a man in unusual clothes.
Canberra Star
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A former Australia Post delivery driver claims a man wearing pyjama pants recruited him to participate in a major phone fraud, which police believe to be worth more than $5 million.
Harjeet Singh, a lowly player in the scam which compromised two telecommunications giants, was sentenced on Friday to an intensive correction order for nearly two years.
The 24-year-old had previously spent a week remanded in custody and, while he avoided further time behind bars, Justice Verity McWilliam noted he was now at risk of deportation.
Singh, an Indian citizen from the Canberra suburb of Casey, had previously pleaded guilty in the ACT Supreme Court to four counts of obtaining property by deception.
An agreed statement of facts shows an unidentified man approached Singh in January 2023 and recruited him to the fraudulent scheme.
The scam involved an unknown party accessing the online accounts of Telstra and Vodafone customers, from which they would order Apple iPhones without the customers’ knowledge.
They would also change the customers’ delivery addresses to places that fell within the remit of a particular driver, ensuring the phones ended up in their hands.
The addresses in Singh’s case were in the Canberra suburb of Ngunnawal, where he was responsible for Australia Post deliveries.
Over the course of about five months, Singh marked 57 consignments as delivered when he was in fact taking the phones home to nearby Taylor, where he lived at the time.
Singh would then pass the devices on to unknown members of the enterprise in exchange for weekly cash payments of $300.
“The phones would generally be collected on the weekend,” the agreed facts state.
When police searched Singh’s home and arrested him in June 2023, officers found 16 of the phones he had supposedly delivered in his bedroom drawers.
However, most of the devices, which primarily came from Telstra, were never recovered.
In total, Singh admitted fraudulently obtaining phones worth a combined $136,933.
At the time of Singh’s arrest, ACT Policing said the wider criminal syndicate had obtained devices worth upwards of $850,000.
However, police said $4.5 million worth of fraudulent phone deliveries had been stopped since their investigation began in February 2023.
Six months after his arrest, Singh participated in a police interview.
He told officers he had been recruited to the scam during a lunch break, when he was approached by a Hindi-speaking man wearing a high-visibility vest and pyjama pants.
He claimed he had not initially realised he was participating in something illegal, and that he had tried to extricate himself when that became apparent to him in mid-April 2023.
However, Singh told police he had been blackmailed into continuing until his arrest by a person who said they would report him to Australia Post if he stopped participating.
In total, he estimated he had only been paid about $5000 for his involvement in the scam.
On Friday, Justice McWilliam accepted Singh had not been “the ultimate mastermind”.
The judge also said the 24-year-old had sought to help his “poverty-stricken” family in India with the money he made from his crimes.
She also noted that while police had not arrested any other members of the criminal enterprise, officers “did not doubt (Singh’s) frankness or his honesty” during his interview.
Justice McWilliam took into account the fact Singh, a man with no prior criminal record, had served a week behind bars on remand.
“This is not a period to be scoffed at,” the judge said. “(He has also) lost his job, his reputation, his self-esteem and his unblemished criminal record.”
Singh’s intensive correction order will run for a total of one year, 11 months and 28 days.
During the first year, he must complete 100 hours of community service.
The court heard while the 24-year-old had been unemployed for six months after being sacked by Australia Post, he was now working casually as a delivery driver elsewhere.
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