By Elesha George
Less than a week before he was scheduled to be sentenced for committing electronic forgery, Dylan Simon, a former Hadeed Motors clerk, was re-arrested and charged.
The 44-year-old, who worked at the company for more than two decades, now faces a string of additional charges connected to the same vehicle he had stolen.
Earlier this week, Simon was slapped with charges of larceny, money laundering, electronic forgery, and falsification of account, which all stem from the fraudulent sale of a Nissan Frontier pickup he stole from the company using falsified information.
According to the charges, sometime between October 2019 and May 2020, Simon made it appear that the dealership had received a $15,000 payment for the vehicle from a customer using a fictitious Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS) cheque. He reportedly inputted this false information into the dealership’s cash receipts register, misleading the company into believing the transaction had been completed when, in fact, no payment had ever been made.
The fraudulent scheme was exposed during an internal audit conducted by Hadeed Motors following the nationwide Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. During the lockdown, the company had been forced to process transactions manually, which created the opportunity for Simon to exploit the system. However, once normal operations resumed, the dealership’s auditors conducted routine checks on the transactions processed during the shutdown. The discrepancies uncovered in Simon’s records ultimately led to a full-blown investigation and his initial arrest.
Simon had previously been found guilty in July 2024 for inputting a fake cheque as payment for the same vehicle, which he then allegedly sold to a government agency.
However, he maintained his innocence, claiming that he was framed by the company. But the prosecution argued that Simon used his accounting skills to manipulate and balance the accounting books.
For his initial convictions, Simon is expected to be sentenced on September 27, following which he will go to court to face the fresh charges.
