The case of the “fictitious Go-Food orders” (Go-Food being the food delivery service of ride-hailing app Go-Jek) has been making headlines in Jakarta since early July, after a Facebook post by the case’s alleged victim, Julianto Sudrajat, went viral. Police finally arrested the alleged perpetrator, a woman named Sugiarti, yesterday and, although all of Julianto’s allegations of her bizarre behavior have not been confirmed, police say she has confessed to the fake food orders.
https://www.facebook.com/julianto.sudrajat/posts/1498975026829408
In his Facebook post, Julianto said that he had received numerous Go-Food orders addressed to him even though he had never used the service and never intended to hurt or cause losses to their drivers. Since Go-Food requires that drivers front the money for orders, Julianto said he paid for many of the orders, some costing hundreds of thousands of rupiahs, out of pity for the drivers. He said he paid millions of rupiah for the fake food orders in total.
In the FB post, he said that “someone who does not like me” made all of the fictitious orders and he had reported that person to the police and to Go-Jek in the hopes that the culprit be stopped and apprehended.
After the post went viral, Julianto told the media that he believed a woman named Sugiarti was behind the Go-Food fraud, claiming she was “terrorizing” him for rejecting her, as he had heard she had done to others.
Julianto said that he had started communicating with Sugiarti in 2016 through social media and they had met just once, under the pretext of Sugiarti asking for information about a job vacancy.
After that single meeting, Julianto claims Sugiarti started communicating with him intensively and expressed her love for him. He said that, after he told her he did not feel the same way, her behavior became much more disturbing.
“I rejected her even when she said she would kill himself, that she wanted to jump from a train. She said she was pregnant even though we have only met once and finally she sent my ID card to my office co-workers and told them I was a liar,” Julianto told Kompas.
He also told the media that after she spread his ID card photo along with her accusations online through social media, he was temporarily suspended from his job.
After he started getting the fake Go-Food orders soon after, Julianto says it wasn’t hard to figure out who they were coming from. He reported Sugiarti to the East Jakarta Police along with evidence of her past actions to support his story.
Media outlets such as Kumpuran soon found Sugiarti, who denied Julianto’s claims that she had made the orders, despite mounting evidence.
Previously, police had attempted to get the two of them together so that the problem could be mediated peacefully. But those efforts did not work out, leading to police eventually naming Sugiarti a suspect for electronic fraud.
Police picked Sugiarti up yesterday evening and East Jakarta Police Chief Andry Wibowo said today that she had confessed to the fake food orders, stating she had been assisted by two of her younger relatives.
Sugiarti was arrested under provisions in Indonesia’s Law on Electronic Information and Transfers (UU ITE) relating to online fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 5 years in jail.
