Fresh from jail, serial scammer faked police report to steal nearly $400k from businessman
Saturday, 4 April 2026
A serial scammer, who had already been jailed three times, conned multiple government agencies in order to steal almost $400,000 from a Nelson businessman.
Brendon Karl Dean Harris, 31, pleaded guilty in the Christchurch District Court on Thursday to six charges linked to an elaborate week-long scam carried out in late December 2025.
Stuff understands Harris was just weeks out of prison at the time.
In December, Harris and his co-defendant made a fake police report and used the businessman’s personal details to convince Inland Revenue, the Department of Internal Affairs, Spark and a bank that they were him.
By the time the scam unravelled, the pair had made 53 transfers worth $397,178.14.
How the scam began
According to court documents, on December 23, Harris called Inland Revenue pretending to be the victim.
After correctly answering a series of personal security questions, he obtained the man’s IRD number.
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Later that day, Harris and his co-defendant filed a fake police report online claiming the victim’s phones, laptop, bank cards, business cards and driver’s licence had been stolen from his car while he was on holiday in Dunedin.
The fake report generated a police file number, which was sent to a phone number controlled by Harris’ co-defendant.
Posing as the victim
The next day, Christmas Eve, Harris called the Department of Internal Affairs and after providing the victim’s personal information, obtained his passport number.
His co-defendant then contacted Spark multiple times claiming the victim’s and his wife’s phones had been stolen, and asking for their numbers to be blocked.
After initially failing, Harris called Spark himself and used the fake police report to persuade staff to block the victim’s phone numbers and replace them with his co-defendant’s number as a temporary contact.
That same day, Harris repeatedly contacted the victim’s bank. The bank’s name is currently suppressed.
Using the police report and extensive personal information, he passed security checks, changed passwords and took control of the victim’s business accounts.
At one point, Harris, pretending to be the victim, told bank staff his son had recently died and his ashes had been stolen from the car along with the other belongings.
The story worked.
The bank changed the contact details on the accounts to the co-defendant’s phone number and Harris gained full access.
Fifty-three transfers in six days
Once they were in, the two men locked the victim out of his accounts and began siphoning money.
Between December 24 and December 30, they made 53 transactions, ranging from about $2000 to $17,500, into the accounts of seven associates. The total amounted to $397,178.14.
Harris’ co-defendant alone received $226,757.14 across 29 transfers.
When the bank became suspicious on December 30, staff rang what they believed was the victim’s temporary number.
It was the co-defendant’s phone.
Harris answered, again pretending to be the victim, and successfully passed further security checks.
The scam ended the following day when the bank was alerted to an unauthorised transaction and froze the accounts.
‘It ruins your trust’
The Nelson businessman, whose name was suppressed, told Stuff it was deeply concerning that people could break into bank customers accounts to steal from them.
“It completely ruins your trust in people and society as a whole, and that thought is devastating from a personal and social context.”
The man was now worried about the amount of information publicly available about him.
“[It] is probably not hard to acquire.
“Even after the theft was noticed and the accounts secured, [they] were still trying to impersonate me with internal affairs and the tax department. For what means I am unsure.”
A long history of similar scams
Harris has a long history of convictions dating to 2013. He was jailed in 2017, 2019 and 2023 for similar offending.
His earlier scams included targeting elderly people living alone, and using stolen driver licences and SIM cards to access bank and utility accounts.
In one case, one victim had put aside savings for his wife’s cancer treatment.
The sophistication of Harris’ 2021 scams, which were worth about $371,000, prompted banks and telecommunications companies to tighten their security processes.
Between 2015 and 2016, he was part of a group that targeted at least 30 elderly women, causing losses of up to $600,000. He pleaded with his sentencing judge at the time not to go to jail.
For the most recent offending, Harris and his co-defendant pleaded guilty to three charges of accessing a computer system for dishonest purposes and one charge of engaging in a money laundering transaction.
Harris pleaded guilty to two additional charges of accessing a computer system for dishonest purposes.
The pair will be sentenced in June.