Jersey Unreported Judgments

Inferior Number Sentencing - fraud

[2024]JRC144

Royal Court

(Samedi)

21 June 2024

Before     :

R. J. MacRae, Esq., Deputy Bailiff, and Jurats Le Cornu and Berry

The Attorney General

-v-

Hannah Louise Hill

Sentencing by the Inferior Number of the Royal Court, following a guilty plea to the following charge:

1 count of:

Fraud (Count 1).

Age:  27.

Plea: Guilty. 

Details of Offence:

Over a period of 6 months the Defendant defrauded the Victim of nearly £10,000.  The parties had met on Instagram with the Defendant initially asking the Victim if he wanted to be her "sugar daddy."  They agreed that he would send her £200 a month but she confirmed to him that if feelings developed the transactional nature of their relationship could be forgotten about it.  The Defendant sent her personal mobile number to the Victim, and they continued messaging via WhatsApp.

 

On 29 March 2023, the Victim sent the Defendant £200 but she lied to him by saying she had not received the money.  The Victim sent her another £200 a few days later, after the Defendant continued to lie by saying she had never received the first payment.

 

The Victim has autism.  Whilst the Defendant did not know of his diagnosis, from their conversations it was clear that the Victim was vulnerable.

 

After lying to the Victim saying she had not received the money she then told him that her mother was unwell, receiving treatment for cancer and sepsis in the UK.  The Defendant asked the Victim for money to buy tickets to see her mother.  Two weeks later the Defendant told the Victim that her mother had died.  These were all lies.  The Defendant's mother was not unwell, was not receiving medical treatment in the UK and is not dead.

 

Over the following five months, the Defendant repeatedly asked the Victim if she could borrow money from him for many different reasons, including:

a.      to pays various bills;

b.      that she had not been paid by her new employer;

c.      to buy flights to attend her mother's funeral in Scotland;

d.      that she attended the Hospital as she was ill and so was struggling to pay bills;

e.      that she had been spending money to travel to the UK to visit family after her mother's death; and

f.       to pay lawyers to sell her dead mother's house.

 

All these claims were lies.  The Victim sent the Defendant various amounts of money, four of the payments were over £1,000 each with the biggest single transaction being £1,800.  The Defendant assured the Victim that she would pay everything back once her mother's house had been sold.  She asked him to trust her.  When the Victim told her that he would struggle to pay his rent, she promised him that he would get the money back but no payment was received by the Victim.  The Defendant also asked the Victim to lie to his family to say that she had paid him back.  The Defendant did eventually send the Victim £1 as a test payment and she told him that she would send him further money but no further money was received.

 

The Victim's sister went to the police to raise concerns about the amount of money leant by the Victim to the Defendant especially after the Victim's sister had found the Defendant's mother alive on Facebook.

 

A few months later the Victim messaged the Defendant asking whether she could return the money.  The Defendant continued to lie by saying she was trying to find a new buyer for her mother's house.  The Defendant then asked for further money which the Victim said he would think about.  The next day he told her he could not help her anymore and the Defendant asked him to delete all their messages.

 

In January 2024, the Defendant's parents transferred £9,600 to her, so that she could repay the money that she had defrauded from the Victim.

Details of Mitigation:

Early guilty plea, good character, remorse. The repayment.

Previous Convictions:

None.

Conclusions:

Count 1:

18 months' imprisonment.

Sentence and Observations of Court:

Count 1:

10 months' imprisonment.

Ms L. E. Taylor, Crown Advocate.

Advocate M. L. Preston for the Defendant.

JUDGMENT

THE DEPUTY BAILIFF:

1.        Hannah Hill, you are 27 years old.  You fall to be sentenced for an offence of fraud.

2.        Your Victim was a 36-year-old man who was vulnerable.  He was not known to you prior to him contacting you on Instagram, a social media platform, in April 2022.

3.        In March of last year, you sent him a message asking him if he wanted to be your "sugar daddy."  It was agreed that he would pay you money in exchange for you sending him pictures and videos of yourself.

4.        It was at your suggestion that your Victim pay you money.  Payments began in March and one of the first payments of £200 you claimed that you had not received when you had received it.

5.        You had some reason to believe that the Victim was vulnerable as he told you that he still lived at home and that you were probably more capable and independent person than he was.  You then told him various lies over a protracted period in order to persuade your Victim to part with more of his money, for example, saying that your Mother was ill with cancer, that you needed to fly to the UK to see her, and ultimately that she had died.  These were all lies.  Your Mother was well and is still living, indeed she has written to the Court on your behalf.

6.        Over the next five months you continued to pester your Victim for increasingly large sums of money on the false assurance that you would repay him.  You made various false claims including that the monies were required to pay bills, to attend your Mother's funeral in Scotland, to pay lawyers to help you sell your dead Mother's house and so on.  In our judgment these were wicked lies.  Your promise that you could repay your Victim was made without any belief in its truth.

7.        By October, your Victim was short of money.  He told you he needed to have some of the money back as he would struggle to pay his rent and he asked you if you could help him with his rent.

8.        By now you knew that your Victim had told his sister what had been going on.  You tried to get your Victim to lie to his own sister to the effect that you had repaid him some of the money.  Your Victim replied, saying "he wasn't much of a liar" and asked you to start repaying him "little by little."

9.        You promised to begin repayments in late October but you did not.  You claimed to have begun making repayments which again was a lie.

10.     Your Victim's sister then contacted the police.  She also believed that you were due to repay her brother when your late Mother's property was sold.  Then she discovered from a search on Facebook that your Mother was still alive.

11.     Remarkably, even after the Victim had gone to the police you continued, in December last year, to pester him for further funds asking for him for several hundred pounds.  On 6 December you asked him to delete all the messages between you - presumably in order to cover your tracks before the police became involved.

12.     You were arrested at the end of December.  Your parents gave you the £9,600 to repay the Victim in January of this year.

13.     You pleaded guilty at the first opportunity in the Magistrate's Court on 18 April 2024 and you will receive full credit for that plea.

14.     The Crown say that while this was not a typical breach of trust case, your Victim on any view placed his trust in you and you must have known from what he told you and indeed what he did that he was credulous and vulnerable.  You repeatedly lied to him in order to gain his trust and obtain money from him.

15.     The offending took place over a period of some six months and the money was used to pay off debts and other personal expenses.

16.     We see from the Victim's personal statement that he was affected financially and from a social and trust perspective.  Your offending has made him feel isolated and he expresses the hope in his Victim personal statement that you will understand the impact that your offending has had upon him.

17.     As is commonplace in cases such as this, you are a person of good character with no previous convictions and with substantial mitigation available to you.

18.     You are fortunate that your parents were able to repay the money that you had obtained by your fraud and we have read the letters and messages from them and others who speak highly of you and given weight to all that has been said upon your behalf.  But the Crown and your own counsel describe this as a despicable crime; we agree.  It was mean, manipulative, heartless and greedy. 

19.     We have reduced the Crown's conclusions as they do not in our judgment sufficiently reflect the mitigation available to you and your early plea.  But his offence is so serious that only a custodial sentence can be justified and the sentence is one of 10 months' imprisonment. 

Authorities

AG v Picot 1990/074

R v Barrick [1985] 7 Cr App R(S) 142

AG v Bellas and Louis [2022] JRC 198

AG v Weller [2022] JRC 139

AG v Allo [2023] JRC 232

AG v Riddock [2021] JRC 037

Kirkland v AG 2001/200