A young Auckland resident who was initially accused of scamming elderly victims out of more than $200,000 has told the court he was merely a low-ranking “foot soldier” who felt “trapped” into blindly helping with the contemptible scheme due to a drug debt.
The amount Eyosiyas Tekeste, 21, is accused of having stolen has since been revised down to about $76,000. He has offered to pay back $500 – the extent, he said, of what he has been able to save up over the past year.
“I’m struggling to know exactly the part you played,” Judge Lisa Tremewan said last week as Tekeste appeared in the Waitākere District Court for sentencing.
While it’s not unusual for co-defendants to point the finger at each other, the judge said she was “prepared to accept your role was perhaps significantly less than the roles played by others”.
“I got the impression you weren’t the mastermind here,” she said.
Court documents outline how three victims fell prey to the scam in October and November 2024.
The first, an 88-year-old ASB Bank customer, received a call purporting to be from the bank’s fraud department on the same day his card had been temporarily blocked due to being compromised.
“The caller requested the victim to transfer money between accounts to make it safer, provide his bank card Pin numbers, and to put his remaining bank cards into an envelope inside a box,” according to the facts of the case agreed to by Tekeste.
“Believing the caller was from the bank, the victim complied with the directions. The victim was then advised that a courier would pick up the box. This was subsequently collected by an Uber.”
The victim ended up losing about $17,400. Of that, $4000 was traced back to Tekeste when he and two other unidentified people made two large ATM withdrawals at Westfield Albany Mall a month after the fake fraud department phone call.
A 72-year-old woman was lured about a month later, after receiving a fake email purporting to be from ANZ Bank that outlined a $450 purchase she had not made.
She called a customer service number on the email - also a ruse – and was tricked into giving her Pin numbers. She was also instructed to put her five bank cards into a letterbox so they could be collected for a “forensic clean”.
Court documents stated that the defendant, acting under direction, “drove to the victim’s home and collected the bank cards out of her letterbox”.
Over the next two days, Tekeste made 23 purchases or withdrawals with the cards, including over $20,000 spent at Louis Vuitton stores.
In total, more than $200,000 was pilfered from the 72-year-old’s account. Of that, Tekeste was found to be responsible for $70,649.
The final victim was a 93-year-old woman also lured via a fake ANZ email and phone number – that one claiming that a direct deposit account had been set up in her name. In the call that followed, the woman was told that the bank would need to collect her cards to determine how the mistaken account set-up had occurred.
Like the others, she was persuaded to reveal her Pin numbers and put her cards in a letterbox for collection.
Her account was later drained of $2800, of which $2000 was traced back to Tekeste.
Of the $76,649 that Tekeste is responsible for taking, only $6000 has been recovered, police prosecutor Stewart King said.
Tekeste was already on bail, awaiting sentencing for drug-related offences, when the scams were carried out. He has since served a sentence of eight months’ home detention for the previous matters.
“Perhaps they can be seen as similar in that they all related to poor choices you were making at the time because of some issues that were going on in your life,” Judge Tremewan told him last week.
Defence lawyer Sofia Mohtadi said her client has shown a significant amount of remorse and insight into his errors in judgment. She said he has tried to make up for it, in part, through voluntary community work – having logged 22 hours so far.
He hoped to move on from his mistakes and study to perhaps become a youth social worker, she explained.
The $500 he brought to court represented a significant amount of saving on his part, she said, explaining that her client was willing to make further weekly payments once he is in steady employment.
Judge Tremewan noted several times during the hearing that Tekeste had also volunteered to attend what turned out to be an “excellent” restorative justice meeting with the 93-year-old victim who had lost $17,000.
“They did not want him to be in prison,” the judge noted of the victim. “They wanted him to be in the community getting on with his life.”
The meeting left the judge with the impression that “there is genuine remorse here”, she said.
But other aspects of the case were less clear.
Judge Tremewan expressed disappointment that no victim impact statements had been provided to the court, and she didn’t know if the victims’ accounts had been restored by their banks or if they remained out of pocket. She hoped that the banks had ultimately shouldered the loss, although that wouldn’t make Tekeste’s behaviour any less distasteful, she said.
“It seems that perhaps there was some naivety by some of the victims, who got drawn in or tricked by the situation and were left at a loss financially,” the judge said. “It’s likely that they felt misled, distressed, that their trust in others had been misplaced.”
The judge acknowledged that it didn’t appear Tekeste had benefited directly from all the money that he had helped take.
“You said you had some issues with drugs and debt,” she said. “Perhaps you were trying to go along ... without knowing all the details ... to get other people off your back.”
Police suggested a starting point of three years’ imprisonment for Tekeste’s latest sentence, while the defence sought two years.
The judge settled on the lesser of the two suggestions before allowing 50% in credits for his guilty pleas, youth, remorse, potential for rehabilitation, his voluntary community work, the restorative justice conference and his offer to make an emotional harm payment.
She said she was tempted to convert the sentence to home detention. But confining him to his home when he’d just finished a similar eight-month sentence would likely create a burden for his family, she added, describing his parents as upstanding and community-minded citizens.
She instead ordered six months of community detention with an overnight curfew followed by one year of intensive supervision, likely to include frequent drug tests. Tekeste was also ordered to serve 125 more hours of community service.
“I hope by doing that additional community work, that will give you a sense of ... trying to put right the best you can what has happened here,” the judge said, urging the defendant to “put these matters behind you” and focus on bettering himself.
Earlier in the hearing, the defence had sought a last-minute bid for permanent suppression after noticing media in the courtroom.
Judge Tremewan rejected the request but declined the Herald’s request to take photos of the hearing, citing Tekeste’s youth and prospects for rehabilitation.
“If there had been a proper basis for such a [suppression] application, one might have thought that counsel would have made an application in the usual way early in the proceedings ... rather than it being raised at the 11th hour ... essentially because the media have exercised their very ordinary right to show up and potentially report on a case,” she said.
Embarrassment is a natural consequence of offending, the judge added, describing the case as “not a trifling fall from grace”, given Tekeste was on bail at the time of offending and the seriousness of the charges.
If he was serious about pursuing social work, she said, it should be noted that many in that profession overcame obstacles earlier in life and use those experiences to connect with those they seek to help.
“The court is certainly hopeful – even a degree of quiet confidence – [that Tekeste] may well move beyond what happened,” she explained, describing him as a capable young person.
“It may end up being a blight on this early part of his life that he can move past.”
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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