Sonia Klair
Absolutely outrageous that someone who defrauds “customers” of $700,000 would have the gall to claim that 10 months home detention is “manifestly excessive”.
A woman who fleeced small businesses in a “sophisticated” fake invoicing scheme that used forged documents made in India has appealed against her sentence.
Sonia Klair, who is now living in Australia, in 2008 set up NZ Look, an internet-based directory where consumers could look up products and services.
During that year, the company began sending out documents that falsely told the recipient that they already had listings with NZ Look and invited them to sign on for another term.
The customers contacted were from a database that originally belonged to NBO, a similar business previously run by Klair and her then-husband.
From early 2010, Klair used forged documents made in India in an attempt to convince businesses they had previously signed on for NZ Look’s services.
These documents copied over customers’ signatures from NBO documents to NZ Look documents.
Klair would then send an invoice requesting payment for the listing to these “clients”.
Over the past 4 months I have received approx. 30 calls from the “National Business Directory’. I no longer own a company and advised the earlier callers (all with Indian accents) not to call me again; to remove my number from their database and that I don’t want to be listed. For 2 weeks no calls then today another call. Instead of telling him to p…. off I made out I could be interested and asked for name and number to call back. Mr Joseph Williams (with a broad Indian/Fijian accent) gave me a number 0280 xxx 629 after also advising me that my business location would be attached to mobile GPS ( I live in a country area 20 km from the nearest town), placed on their website (non existent Google search for N.B.D) all at a cost of $29.99 per year.
I an now confident (after reading here about Mr Singh) that this just another variation on a theme.