Temp stole £10k in Oyster card fraud (From Richmond and Twickenham Times)

Temp stole £10k in Oyster card fraud

8:10am Friday 22nd August 2008 in The Chiswick By Chris Briddon

A temp working at Transport for London who gave more than £10,000 in bogus Oyster ticket products, refunds and compensation payments to her friends and family has been sentenced to nine months in prison.

Koreanna D’Souza, 27, of Bath Road, Hounslow, was employed on TfL’s Oyster help desk between October 2006 and March last year, during which time she made 22 fraudulent refunds and payments.

After her six-month stint at Transport for London, D’Souza flew off on a four-month holiday to India.

One payment in March 2007 was for £2,552 for a refunded Oyster card that D’Souza alleged was lost in the post, but on investigation it was discovered the card had never been issued.

The offences came to light when the same Oyster card was being processed for another refund of £2,505, after being cancelled after just four days’ use.

This raised concerns among staff in the refund department and the matter was referred to Transport for London’s fraud investigation team.

D’Souza was identified by her computer log, and a further 20 bogus payments came to light, many of which were dated March 16 – her last day of work at TfL and a week before she flew to India.

Other payments were for several more replacement travel cards she claimed had been lost in the post worth £2,552 £1,720, £991.20 and £495.60.

After returning from holiday, D’Souza was arrested and interviewed jointly by the Metropolitan Police Fraud Squad and Transport for London’s fraud investigators.

At Southwark Crown Court in May she pleaded guilty to 22 counts of fraud by abuse of a position of trust and was sentenced at the same court on Monday.

Judge Christopher Hardy told the court the sentence should act as a deterrent to others in terms of abuse of positions of trust.

D’Souza was sentenced to nine months, to run concurrently, for each of the 22 charges.