Former Tuggeranong Vodafone store owner Mohit Arora given suspended jail sentence

Former Tuggeranong Vodafone store owner Mohit Arora, 34, was labelled "an evil, despicable human being" in one of the 11 victim impact statements read to the ACT Supreme Court on Monday.

Acting Justice Stephen Norrish took a different view as he sentenced the former Greenway man on Thursday, however, describing him as "naive".

The judge sentenced Arora to a two-year jail term, which was suspended immediately in favour of a three-year good behaviour order.

Arora, who now manages a restaurant in Sydney, pleaded guilty in November to a charge of participating in a criminal group.

Acting Justice Norrish said on Thursday that the offender, "a man not greatly experienced in business", began operating Vodafone stores in Tuggeranong and Queanbeyan in early 2019 as a third-party dealer.

He accepted the father-of-two's evidence that a man had offered to provide IT support at the Tuggeranong store.

Arora, an Indian immigrant, saw the man with a USB stick at that business on one occasion and asked him, in Hindi, what he was doing with it.

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The man replied that he was copying customers' contract information, which he was going to sell to online marketers.

Acting Justice Norrish said Arora, despite being "somewhat naive" in the running of a business, ought to have known his customers' confidential information should not be comprised in this fashion.

But Arora turned a blind eye to what the IT person was doing, telling him it was OK to "make some extra money" with the information as long as he did not end up in any trouble.

Instead of being provided to online marketers, the personal information of 43 Vodafone customers who visited Arora's Tuggeranong store between March 2019 and May 2019 landed in the hands of an identity theft syndicate.

The criminal group used the details between November 2019 and May 2020 to apply for credit cards, debit cards and personal loans in the customers' names.

The thieves caused "chaos", as Acting Justice Norrish put it, making a total of 86 successful applications to ANZ, Bankwest, Latitude Financial Services and American Express.

Those financial institutions lost $928,661.66 as a result, with more than half that amount scammed from ANZ.

There were also 142 transactions made on fraudulently obtained credit cards issued in the names of Arora's customers, 11 of whom wrote victim impact statements about the impacts on lives after their identities were stolen.

Acting Justice Norrish said these people had suffered "considerable mental anguish", inconvenience and, in some instances, financial loss.

He said there was a common theme of good credit ratings having been badly damaged, while the identity thefts had "shaken the confidence of each of the victims" in their abilities to protect their private information.

While he found Arora "was clearly in breach of trust", the judge accepted the 34-year-old had not known how the confidential information was to be misused and noted his guilty plea had been entered on the basis of recklessness.

Acting Justice Norrish also said Arora, described by his wife as a selfless man who liked to avoid confrontation "at all costs", had no motivation to commit the offence, from which the businessman did not personally profit.

The court heard Arora's business arrangement with Vodafone had been terminated in late 2020.

No other participants in the criminal group have been charged, with the IT person believed to have left Australia and nobody else identified as yet.

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