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Sysadmin gets 5 years for slurping contractor payments to employer

And he would have got away with it too, if it wasn't for a simple scheduled audit

A 49-year-old IT bloke from Essex has been sentenced to five years' imprisonment on two counts of fraud after his cunning plan to steal £450,000 from his employer was uncovered... almost immediately.

Adeshola Dada, of Watts Crescent, Purfleet, Essex, was employed in the IT department of Genesis Housing Association, where he changed the passwords of two colleagues working in the financial department.

Dada subsequently attempted to divert payments for genuine suppliers into the account of co-conspirator Ansar Ali's company. Pretty much straight after the event, an internal audit team at Genesis discovered that a payment of £138,788 had been made to a bank account held by Pathmeads Property Services, which Genesis had no contracts with.

Once alerted to the fraudulent transaction, the team managed to stop a further payment of £290,090 that was due to be effected a few days later.

While Dada's job title was that of an ICT Analyst, Court News UK reported that Southwark Crown Court heard his role was closer to that of a sysadmin, as it "involved supporting users with all computer based access and systems performance issues, including password creation and resetting."

A forensic investigator brought in by Genesis discovered that the attempt to divert the payments was committed by a user connecting to the businesses' systems remotely using the username and password of an employee who had left the company.

Southwark Crown Court heard that Genesis' systems logs showed that Keys' password had been changed, and forensic analysis further showed that Dada, in fact, had been the only person with password reset privileges on Genesis' systems.

When Dada’s laptop was seized, Dada told police he would loan it out to people and not keep a record of whom he had loaned it to. He was found guilty of two counts of fraud on 19 August and was sentenced today.

Alongside him, Ansar Ali, 43, of Limehouse Causeway was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, suspended for two years and ordered to carry out 225 hours of unpaid work after pleading guilty to acquiring criminal property at an earlier hearing

Two others were sentenced for their roles in the scam, which involved receiving sums of around £10,000 into their bank accounts.

James McMasters, 24, of The Heights, Northolt, Middlesex was found guilty of acquiring criminal property. He was sentenced to one year imprisonment, suspended for two years. He was also ordered to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work.

Danielle Gillian Brown, 25, of Church Lane, N8 was found guilty of the same offence. She was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment, suspended for one year. ®

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