Aussie caught by Air NZ with 16m phoney air points

An alleged Australian scam artist exposed by Air New Zealand amassed 16 million frequent flyer points -- even though he never left the ground, a Melbourne court was told yesterday.

An internal investigation by Air New Zealand in November 2002 found Austin Perrott, of Melbourne, was a member of its Gold Elite class of passengers but his "extraordinarily large amounts of points" were actually accrued through a computer at Melbourne Airport.

Perrott, of the Melbourne suburb of Balwyn, appeared in the city's Magistrates Court yesterday and reserved his plea on numerous charges, mostly of obtaining a financial advantage by deception.

Defence lawyer Suzie Cameron indicated that Perrott, 45, would plead guilty when he was bailed to appear in Melbourne County Court on October 24.

The Age in Melbourne reported today a police summary tendered to yesterday's court said Perrott found he could add names to the passenger lists, while he worked as a Singapore Airlines customer services supervisor in Melbourne.

In February 1996 he embarked on a 6-1/2-year scam collecting almost A$790,000 ($864,000) worth of points, of which A$222,000 was redeemed by selling airline tickets to unsuspecting family and friends.

His offending resulted in losses of A$151,000 to 10 airlines, including Air New Zealand, Qantas, British Airways and American Airlines, although Perrott disputed the amounts involved.

The summary said the scam allegedly began when he stumbled on an "irregularity" in Qantas' mainframe computer system and found that passenger lists for flights that had departed and landed remained "active" and could be accessed.

He knew from working in the airline industry for more than 15 years that once a computer system closed a flight's passenger list, all data was automatically sent to the airline's frequent flyer program.

He "flew" so often that he reached VIP frequent flyer level before rocketing to Gold Elite status.

Friends at Qantas gave Perrott the password to the airline's computer system.

According to the police summary, Perrott told them he wanted the password in order to gain access to cheap or free seats commonly available to staff and colleagues at other airlines.

Using the password, he was able to access the computer systems of several other airlines at Melbourne Airport.

Perrott told police he stumbled on the scam, tried it a couple of times and "thought ... OK, this seems to work".

"Tried it on one airline and then tried it on several others and found that it was, you know, quite easy to create the accounts and subsequently credit them with...points and it basically got out of hand," he said.

- NZPA