Former driving instructor who did driver theory tests for money is jailed

By Natasha Reid

A former driving instructor who fraudulently carried out 21 driver theory tests for money has been jailed for a year.

The judge said that the qualified HGV driver was ‘a perfect candidate’ for the very elaborate scheme in which customers paid up to €2,500 to have someone else sit their tests.

Daniel Trifan (51), with an address at Beechfield Meadows, Clonee in Dublin was before Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on Thursday, having pleaded guilty to conspiracy to engage in the unlawful use of a computer, and conspiracy to make a gain or cause a loss by deception by sitting the tests between June 9th and November 14th, 2019.

Detective Garda Gary McCormack told the court that Trifan was one of six people who came to garda attention for providing the unlawful service between 2018 and 2021.

He got paid about €150 per test and was not involved in the organisation of the scheme.

While five of the six have now been jailed, the ringleader is still at large, he said.

Dt Gda McCormack explained that people who were not confident in their ability to pass the tests would contact the group and pay between €1,000 and €2,500 for someone else to sit the tests in their names.

The group completed a total of 124 tests between 2018 and 2021 with Trifan sitting 21 of them between June and November 2019.

In all cases, the person sitting the test on a computer at a test centre used a fake Romanian ID card in the name of the customer. A driver test cert would issue after the test was passed, allowing the paying customer to get a learning permit and start driving on the road.

The detective agreed with the defence that Mr Trifan gave a very fulsome interview, confirming a lot of garda suspicions.

He told them he had fallen on hard times after the breakdown of his relationship and was unemployed when he was approached by a man from the same town as him in Romania. This man said he could offer him some work.

Trifan told gardaí that when he tried to leave, he was threatened. The defence handed in documentation from Pieta House that spoke of his low mood and suicidal ideation at the time.

His barrister told the court that Trifan had come to Ireland in 1999 and had worked in construction, qualifying as a HGV driver, and had also worked as a driving instructor.

Judge Orla Crowe said that it was an essential part of road safety that the drivers of cars knew the rules of the road, and that faking it was inherently serious.

“Clearly he was a HGV driver, so he was a perfect candidate,” she said.

She described as aggravating the fact that, having been charged, he left the jurisdiction and had to be arrested in Cyprus on a European Arrest Warrant. In mitigation, she took his mental health difficulties into consideration.

However, she said she had to mark the offence with a custodial sentence.

“He did go in 21 times and impersonated another person,” she said.

She imposed a 12-month sentence, backdating it to when he was extradited from Cyprus in September last.