TWO former salesmen who ripped off a North Vancouver stock company were given a conditional discharge by a judge Friday after the pair convinced her they had turned their lives around.
James Gorecki, 31, and Arif Roya, 33, were both put on 18 months' probation but will escape without a criminal record after admitting they stole $23,000 by diverting customers' payments from the North Vancouver-based AlphaTrade.com while they worked for the company between 2005 and 2007.
The pair managed to steal the money by incorporating another company with a very similar sounding name - Alphamedia Inc. - opening a bank account for the bogus business and telling AlphaTrade's customers to deposit their payments there.
Four customers made six payments totaling $23,000 to the account.
While describing that as a "relatively modest amount" in terms of commercial crime, Crown prosecutor Kevin Gillett said the two men still abused their positions of trust and shouldn't get off without a criminal record, saying "there's too much money and too much planning to justify it."
But defence lawyers for both men convinced Judge Joanne Challenger their scheme was an aberration in otherwise crime-free lives brought on by financial hardship.
Lawyer David Butcher said Gorecki began working at the company selling online advertising in November of 2005 but quickly became disillusioned by the business practices of AlphaTrade.
Customers "were told their email lists would reach hundreds of thousands of people when they would only reach thousands of people," said Butcher.
Roya's lawyer Tony Paisana said his client also became disillusioned when "he was exposed to some of the less reputable tactics of the company" while he was still struggling to pay his debts.
The B.C. Securities Commission ordered AlphaTrade to cease trading in 2010 after the company did not publicly disclose a $3.2-million death benefit paid out on behalf of a company director and after the securities commission noted "unexplained and unusual fluctuations" in the volume and price of the company's shares.
Butcher said since the time he pulled off the fraud, Gorecki has paid back all of the money and has turned his life around, training as an ambulance paramedic and being commended for the job he did on the night of the Stanley Cup hockey riot. Gorecki also volunteers with the Red Cross and the Coast Guard auxiliary, said Butcher, adding his client is "a perfect candidate for a discharge."
Paisana said Roya - whose family fled both Afghanistan and Iran - used the money he stole to pay down his student debt and to bring his fiancée to Vancouver.
