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A marketing executive generated fake invoices to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Opera Australia to swindle $2.4 million from a finance company and spent almost $100,000 on online gambling before his scheme was uncovered.
Mark Andrew Barnes, director of Barnes Marketing Services, was imprisoned for one year and 10 months last month after pleaded guilty to dishonestly obtaining the millions by deception.
NSW District Court documents seen by the Herald reveal Barnes was issuing invoices to a financing company Handley Advisory, which was trading under the name FIFO for work with the SSO and OA.
Barnes had formerly worked with SSO, running telemarketing campaigns to raise funds for the symphony in 2018, but the contract finished around May that year.
Ordinarily, Barnes would send invoices for his work to FIFO, which would advance about 80 per cent of the money he was owed by a client such as SSO. Weeks later, when SSO or OA paid their full invoice, Barnes would repay the advance to FIFO plus fees.
The arrangement essentially allowed Barnes to access the money owed to him within hours, rather than weeks. But it also allowed him to create a rolling deception.
Barnes continued to send invoices for telemarketing work with the SSO to FIFO between May 2018 and December 2019 for eye-watering sums. In total, he sent 17 invoices for work at the SSO for sums ranging between $37,000 and $169,000.
Barnes also forwarded a series of emails to FIFO showing his communications with a marketing manager at SSO.
“Thanks for the catch-up earlier,” one email read.
“Have a great Christmas,” another said.
“April and Mary are doing well,” Barnes wrote in one email.
But the invoices and the emails were all frauds.
In reality, Barnes had not been asked to do any work for SSO after May 2018, and the marketing manager he was emailing had left the symphony entirely in November that year.
The invoices and the emails were never sent to SSO. Instead, FIFO had simply been paying Barnes for work that never happened, and he had been paying them back with their own money.
While the massive funds flowed in and out of Barnes’ company, he was able to use the lag time to live large; meals and drinks, taxis, airfares, groceries, cash withdrawals, rent, salary and even superannuation were all siphoned off.
Barnes repeated a similar scam in 2019 and 2020 with Opera Australia except the invoices were for real work but “grossly inflated”, the court documents state. They ranged between $105,000 and $190,000.
The court documents state more than $99,000 evaporated into Sportsbet and Ladbrokes accounts between April 2019 and Christmas Eve 2019.
“Welcome back to the office,” Barnes wrote to the long-gone SSO marketing manager in a fake email sent to FIFO on January 12, 2020.
“First 2020 week was great, and hopefully, we continue the January momentum. Most recent invoice attached for you.”
It all came undone when FIFO requested bank statements from Barnes, and he provided a redacted and falsified screenshot of his accounts.
The finance company refused to pay the invoice and Barnes’ rolling scam ground to a halt.
He had left them $270,000 out of pocket and had attempted to extract a final $118,000, the court documents state. A total of $2.4 million from FIFO flowed through his accounts as part of the scam.
By April 2020, Barnes was bankrupt, his company wound up by 2021 and ASIC opened an investigation in 2022.
Barnes accepted responsibility in November 2025 for his crimes and was sentenced on April 30. He will do a year of home detention at his Sutherland unit and 300 hours of community service.
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