SINGAPORE: A former StarHub employee who pocketed more than S$15,000 over three years by exploiting an IT system loophole at the telco was on Friday (Nov 23) sentenced to nine months' jail.
Yazid Hafizuddin Abdul Khair, 30, was employed by StarHub in 2012 as a customer service consultant.
AdvertisementHis duties, which included helping customers troubleshoot telco issues, allowed him access to StarHub's customer relationship management system, known as Siebel.
In 2015, Yazid received a call from a customer enquiring about penalty charges for early termination of his mobile voice service.
Yazid discovered there were no penalty charges for early termination of the voice service even though it was tied to a mobile phone contract.
He then experimented on his own mobile service account and discovered that early termination charges would not apply if he reduced the length of the mobile voice services contract to 12 months from 24 months using the Siebel system.
AdvertisementAdvertisementInstead of reporting this to his supervisor, Yazid began buying mobile phone plans under three names - himself, his brother and his wife - in order to obtain the phones at low prices.
Yazid would then modify the length of the contracts, allowing him to terminate the contracts without having to pay any penalties, and sell the phones.
In all, Yazid bought and manipulated 20 mobile phone contracts over a period of about three years, earning himself S$15,000.
He was discovered only in January this year, when a StarHub fraud analyst detected the misuse of the Siebel system.
Yazid had pleaded guilty to 12 charges under the Computer Misuse and Cybersecurity Act on Wednesday, with 30 other charges taken into consideration for sentencing.
District Judge Victor Yeo in passing his sentence said that his key sentencing consideration in this case was deterrence.
"In the current cybersecurity climate, cyber crimes that are easy to commit but difficult to detect have seen a rise in Singapore," said the judge.
He added that the harm should not be underestimated in today's digital age, and that the punishment meted out by the courts must be sufficient to deter like-minded people from committing similar offences.
Even so, he noted that Yazid committed the crimes using his own name and his relatives' names, and did not affect the accounts of other StarHub customers.
He also took into consideration that Yazid had made full restitution to StarHub and had pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity.
He allowed Yazid to defer his sentence for a week to settle personal matters.
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