A trio's bungled attempts to scam millions from a major bank have been likened to a lottery hopeful's desire to walk away with the jackpot.
But much of the group's efforts to fleece more than $20 million from NAB through various schemes were said to be ultimately unsophisticated and inept.
Monika Singh, 42, Davendar Deo, 68, and Srinivas Naidu Chamakuri, 51, were convicted of a myriad of fraud-related offences between 2018 and 2020 following a lengthy trial in the NSW District Court.
Lawyers for the trio told a sentence hearing on Thursday, the fact the offending was "doomed to fail" from the very start should be taken into account in deciding their fates.
Todd Pickering, who was representing Ms Singh, accepted she had abused her position of trust as a then senior associate at NAB's Sydney branch, but described the efforts as, "inept, hopeless and ultimately unsuccessful”.
"The efforts here were very, very far short of sophisticated,” Mr Pickering told the court.
Singh provided Chamakuri and Deo the with blank internal bank vouchers, which they then used to try to cheat NAB out of a combined $21 million.
Mr Pickering said while the amounts being sought were significant, there was ultimately no loss incurred by the bank, which in most cases immediately flagged and blocked the attempted transfers.
“It could have been 50 trillion billion, it wouldn't have made any difference, it wouldn’t have worked," he said.
The court was also told Ms Singh had been charged over a previous alleged fraud offence in 2006 in Queensland, over which she had paid a small restitution with no conviction recorded.
Chamakuri's lawyer Troy Edwards SC conceded there was a need to deter others from attempting to make their fortunes through bank fraud.
"If everybody ripped the banks off the whole system would collapse," he said.
However, Mr Edwards asked the court to take into consideration that most of the money the group were attempting to gain never made it into their accounts, comparing his client's efforts to playing the lottery.
When the attempted fraud was unsuccessful the first time, they attempted the same flawed method to access the money four more times, Mr Edwards said.
"When a person buys a lotto ticket they’ve got some sort of expectation that they’re in it to win it," he said.
"You’ve got, ‘let’s try it once, that didn’t work - let’s try the same thing again’."
The trio were convicted on all 19 of the charges they were facing, including multiple counts of dishonestly obtaining a financial advantage.
Crown prosecutor Andrew Norrie said there was some level of sophistication to the offending, in that internal bank documents were used.
"It cannot just be written off," he said.
“Ordinary members of the community would not be able to pull off a scam such as this without the access to and then use of the internal NAB documents that were in fact used."
The hearing continues.
