Man’s TikTok complaint about builder ends up costing $1m

A Melbourne man’s TikTok video complaining about the company he hired to build a suburban family home has cost him more than $1 million after a series of court battles that went from bad to worse for the property owner.

The County Court of Victoria last week ordered Gurvinderpal Singh to pay $105,000 each to the two bosses of Singh Homes, a building company primarily catering to the Indian community in Melbourne, for defaming them with a series of false claims.

That sum came on top of $673,000 that the court had already ordered Gurvinderpal to pay to the company itself after a string of customers scrapped plans to use Singh Homes because they were alarmed by the accusations in the video.

Gurvinderpal hired Singh Homes in 2022 to build his family a home in outer Melbourne suburb Truganina, but after construction began the following year, relations soured as the homeowner raised concerns about the quality of the work and the company complained about the timeliness of his payments.

In February 2024, the company terminated Gurvinderpal’s contract and he responded with a post on Facebook, and then one on TikTok in Punjabi that went viral and reached more than 220,000 people.

“I had a very bad experience with Singh Homes,” Gurvinderpal said, according to a translation cited in a court judgment. “During the construction of the house … from the slab stage to till now, whatever they … finished, major faults were found in everything.

“Many times, you call them, and they won’t give any response to you because their time is valuable but your time has no value.

“A person thinks that he should commit suicide by throwing himself under the train, they put you into such a situation.”

The claims went to a jury, which found they were not true.

Judge Julie Clayton found that entitled Singh Homes to $673,000 after about a dozen customers aborted planned contracts with the company and its reputation took a hit, including via unfounded fears it was in financial strife.

But Clayton ruled that Singh Homes’ bosses, Parvinder “Goldie” Singh Sarwara and Daman Preet Singh Anand, who were both named in Gurvinderpal’s video, were only entitled to $5000 each for a “minor and temporary loss of commercial reputation”.

She ruled in late 2025 that they had not suffered “serious” defamation because, in her view, they had only shown they were personally hurt by Gurvinderpal’s words and had not provided evidence of concrete harm to the way other people saw them.

In August, the Victorian Court of Appeal overturned that ruling, noting there was evidence showing the video had been widely shared and discussed within the Indian community. In particular, there were numerous comments from other users on TikTok criticising Sarwara and Anand. The video had also been sent around via WhatsApp.

That hurt Sarwara and Anand’s reputations, which had been built on the more than 1500 homes their company had built and the organisations they sponsored, including local social events and sporting clubs.

On October 28, Clayton reassessed the damages Sarwara and Anand were owed at $105,000 each, taking the total amount ordered by the court to $883,000, plus legal costs and interest that will almost certainly take the full sum above $1 million.

Professor David Rolph of the University of Sydney said the decision showed that social media posts could meet the threshold of “serious harm”, which is a relatively new requirement for a defamation claim.

The viral nature of social media, Rolph said, meant the “grapevine effect”, in which a false claim spreads among a community, could apply to an even greater extent than in a traditional media or offline publication.

Lawyers for Singh Homes and Gurvinderpal were contacted for comment.

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