Ex-StarHub staff pleads guilty to manipulating system to avoid charges on phone contracts

SINGAPORE — A 30-year-old former StarHub employee exploited a loophole in the telco’s IT system and pocketed about S$15,000 over a three-year period.

He did this by buying 20 mobile phones at low contract prices, modifying the length of the contracts to avoid penalty payments, and reselling the phones at higher prices.

On Wednesday (Nov 21), Yazid Hafizuddin Abdul Khair pleaded guilty to 12 charges under the Computer Misuse and Cybersecurity Act. He is out on S$20,000 bail, and will return to court on Friday to be sentenced.

He also admitted to 30 other similar charges, which will be taken into consideration during sentencing.

Yazid, who was employed as a customer service consultant at StarHub’s call centre in Tai Seng, got the idea in January 2015 after a customer called to check his penalty charges for terminating a mobile phone contract early. 

He then discovered that there would be no early termination charges if he were to reduce the length of the customer’s mobile voice services contract from two years to one. However, he did not report the loophole to his supervisor.

Instead, he leapt at the opportunity to sign up for mobile phone plans under three names — his wife, younger brother, and himself — to get the latest iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones at low prices.

To avoid early termination charges, which customers usually have to pay, he logged in to his work account on StarHub’s customer relationship management system to change the length of these contracts.

Court documents stated that the phones he bought with a contract included a new iPhone 8 Plus 64GB, which he got for free last December in signing up for a Starhub XL mobile voice service plan online that cost more than S$200 a month.

He later sold the iPhone for S$1,000.

On Jan 7 this year, he logged in to the StarHub system at work and terminated the contract after making a change to the contract period, avoiding early termination charges of S$1,498.

He then went online and bought the same iPhone model for S$1 with StarHub’s L mobile voice service plan, which would cost more than S$100 a month. He also sold the phone for S$1,000. He then used the same method to avoid paying S$1,284 in early termination charges.

While he earned about S$15,000 from reselling the phones, StarHub suffered total losses of S$22,684, including the costs of phones.

Yazid’s criminal acts between 2015 and 2018 went undiscovered until January this year, when StarHub fraud analyst Koh Teng Hiok and his team found that he had modified the contract details of services under his, his wife’s and younger brother’s names. After conducting an internal investigation, Mr Koh made a police report on Feb 12.

Yazid faces up to three years in jail and/or a fine of up to S$10,000 for each proceeded charge.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Thiagesh Sukumaran told the court on Wednesday that he is seeking a punishment of nine months’ jail, pointing out that the methods he used were “sophisticated, making it extremely difficult to detect”.

Before Wednesday’s court proceedings, Yazid had voluntarily made full restitution of the telco’s losses, his lawyer Mumtaj Banu said, referring to a receipt from StarHub acknowledging the payment.

Responding to queries from TODAY, StarHub said: “We have in place an internal control system, segregation of duties and processes to detect anomalies in business activities. We regularly review and revise these measures to appropriately address new or previously uncontrolled risks.”