A man told police he had no idea how $5000 came to be deposited in his Kiwibank account but he had spent most of it, the Dunedin District Court heard yesterday.
Adrian Allan Waldron, 32, fork lift operator, said he knew nothing about a scam in which money was electronically transferred to Kiwibank accounts from ANZ bank accounts which did not have the funds to cover the payments. But he acknowledged he had no right to the $5000 he found in his account on April 26.
He admitted a charge of stealing $4800 from Kiwibank and was remanded for sentence next month. The charge had been amended from one of dishonestly using a document, a Kiwibank bank card, to obtain a pecuniary advantage.
Kiwibank had been the target of criminal offending in the Dunedin area since the beginning of February, prosecutor Sergeant Graeme Evans told the court. So far this year, the bank had lost a total of $29,100 locally as a result of valueless automatic payment fraud. And there had been attempts to transfer a further $7500.
Waldron had previously held a Kiwibank account. He was not known to the complainant whose ANZ account was used in the scam in which $5000 was credited to the defendant's Kiwibank account about 11.10pm on April 26.
