Mark Uytendaal had a plan.
He bought a block of land on which he would build a dual occupancy house share with his mother, Kerry, whom he would eventually care for.
Mark Uytendaal and his mother Kerry lost savings of $200,000 in the scam.
Instead, Mark lives alone in a shed on his otherwise empty 3000 square metre property near Lakes Entrance in eastern Victoria, all because of a devastating online scam that swallowed his and his mother’s life savings.
“I was just gutted and empty,” he said of the moment he realised the $200,000 they had invested in what they thought was a term deposit with financial giant AMP was sent abroad by fraudsters.
“I’d worked pretty hard and was ready to move out here into the country and start fresh, and there goes all my hard-earned money.”
Kerry Uytendaal and her late husband Art Uytendaal, who passed away seven months after they discovered their investment was a scam.
Mark and Kerry Uytendaal are two plaintiffs in a civil lawsuit in the NSW Supreme Court against Hassan Mehdi, the founder of the allegedly fraudulent company Supercheap Security.
Their nightmare began in mid-2022 when Kerry searched the internet for the best interest rates and came across what she believed to be a product comparison website listing information from AMP.
Soon after, Kerry received follow-up emails and a phone call from a person who purported to work for AMP.
She received several emails from “AMP” staff with subject lines such as “account verification” and “funding information” along with fake AMP signatures, logos and slogans.
“A man phoned me with this English accent, and then he sent me all these papers, which all looked like AMP papers,” Kerry said.
An email Mark Uytendaal received from what he believed to be “AMP”.
“This all took about probably 10 days until he finally got me to transfer the money, and he didn’t harass me at all.”
She was offered a term deposit and was told to transfer her funds into an account that had been set up with her name.
Kerry actually paid $100,000 into the bank account of Supercheap Security, a company she didn’t know existed. Once the funds were deposited into the account, they were sent straight overseas.
Impressed with the attractive interest rate, Kerry told her son Mark about the term deposit.
He also transferred $100,000 into the account.
Some of the fraudulent documents sent to Kerry Uytendaal.
It would be a few more months before the pair discovered the awful reality when a message from another victim, Joanne O’Brien, who lost a whopping $500,000 to the scam, landed in Mark’s Facebook Messenger inbox.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Mark said.
“All the money mum and I thought was sitting there gaining some interest to set up our new life was gone.”
A fourth plaintiff in the proceedings, Judy Fleiter, lost $175,000.
One of two men associated with the hoax is Melbourne-based Mehdi, originally from Pakistan. He set up Supercheap Security in 2021 for the purported purpose of selling security equipment online. However, records show the company has only made a single transaction worth $152.96 on May 5, 2022.
In the Supreme Court civil case where the Uytendaals and others sued Mehdi, he did not dispute the fraudulent loss of money. However, he told the court he gave control of Supercheap Security to his friend Ali Waheed before the fraud and was not aware of it until much later.
“I am treated as second defendant, even though I was also deceived by a close friend whom I have helped since he arrived in Australia,” Mehdi said during cross-examination.
The emails the Uytendaals received mimicked AMP slogans and logos.
But Justice Scott Nixon found Mehdi proceeded “with urgency” to set up a Supercheap bank account for Waheed before he passed on company ownership, which he ought to have known would be used to send hundreds of thousands of dollars to Asia and the Middle East.
He concluded Mehdi acted dishonestly by “wilfully and recklessly” failing to find out why Waheed wanted the account and “turned a blind eye” to how the account was used, potentially to absolve himself from responsibility.
ASIC records show that Supercheap Security is still a registered business in Australia.
Mehdi was criminally charged over the fraud, but the charges were dropped due to concerns about the strength of the prosecution case – much to the Uytendaals’ anger.
Meanwhile, Waheed left Australia and evaded any legal action. He is believed to be in the Middle East.
Mehdi admitted to the civil court he deleted his WhatsApp message history with Waheed after being released from custody in 2022 while the civil proceedings had already begun.
The scammers sent many emails purporting to be from AMP and confirming each step
Nixon ordered Mehdi to repay the Uytendaals the $100,000 they each invested in the Supercheap account, as well as interests and costs.
But Mark, who lost his father Art during his expensive legal battles, was sceptical about recovering his lost funds, as Mehdi told the court he would need to be declared bankrupt.
He left his job at a commercial seed company and hoped to start his own business right before he was scammed, leaving him out of work and struggling financially.
“Some days, you just want to stay in bed and not talk to anyone or see anyone after what we’ve been through,” he said.
“What these people have done is disgusting.”
Mark stressed the importance of face-to-face investment, saying he would never deal with online financial services again.
‘It can happen to anyone’
He and Kerry are far from alone in being scammed.
Data released by the AFP-led Joint Policing Cybercrime Coordination Centre (JPC3) found Australians reported losing $382 million to investment scams in the 2023–24 financial year.
Police believe the true prevalence of these scams, which often involve registered Australian companies, is unknown because victims are often unaware they’ve been scammed or are too embarrassed to report it to authorities.
But Kerry is not ashamed of sharing details of her ordeal because this was the first time she had fallen for a scam, which also tricked a doctor and an academic.
“It can happen to anyone,” she said.
“And since I’ve told people, they’ll ring me up and say, ‘Oh, I nearly got scammed. Thank God you told me’.”
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