Woman defrauded friend out of £42k
‘A PICTURE of sustained and wicked exploitation’ was how the Royal Court described the crimes carried out by a woman who pretended to be a man on Facebook and defrauded a workmate out of more than £40,000.
Claudia Rodrigues, 26, was sentenced to a total of two years and eight months in jail after she admitted six counts of making false representations, plus one of attempting the same, and obtaining a total of £42,360 from Zelia Cotterill.
Advocate Will Giles, prosecuting, said that Rodrigues, who at a previous hearing gave her address as Havilland House, Havilland Road, St Peter Port, had come to live in Guernsey about three years before her arrest in 2017.
She took a job with a cleaning company in late 2015 and it was there that she met Ms Cotterill. Both women were from Portugal. Ms Cotterill was in her late 40s and had lived in the island for some 25 years, being married to a local man at one point.
The two became close friends, and they spoke about past relationships. Later on, Rodrigues told Ms Cotterill that she knew a Portuguese man who was in the island who was interested in contacting her.
As a result, a man named Guillaume Costa befriended Ms Cotterill on Facebook and Advocate Giles said that within a matter of days she came to believe he was hoping for a relationship.
He told her he was 48 and had lived in Guernsey for about 25 years. The two became close and corresponded regularly, but the advocate said that Ms Cotterill never spoke to the man, or met him.
Over the coming six months he asked for various sums of money, which she sent to him.
At first he said these were to help him pay for his divorce from his wife.
Later, he told Ms Cotterill that he had been diagnosed with cancer and needed funds to help pay for treatment.
He also told her that his late mother had left him a substantial amount of money, but he could not pay it into Ms Cotterill’s bank account because there was ‘too much in it’, and he asked her to move money, temporarily, to another account.
Ms Cotterill paid Mr Costa in two main ways, said Advocate Giles, by giving cash to Rodrigues, who said she knew him since he worked for a finance company that had the cleaning firm as a client, and by direct electronic payments to a bank account.
When Mr Costa said Ms Cotterill should move money to another account, he suggested she send it to Rodrigues, which she did.
Over a period of about six months, Ms Cotterill paid just over £42,000 to the counterfeit man.
It was only when a member of staff at her bank became suspicious of her frequently withdrawing large sums that she stopped, and the police were alerted.
Their investigations revealed that Mr Costa did not exist, and that a fake Facebook account had been set up by Rodrigues. It was also found that messages received by Ms Cotterill had been sent from Rodrigues’s mobile phone.
When Rodrigues was charged, she initially denied the offences, but later changed her plea and admitted all seven counts.
Since being charged she had repaid about £6,000 to Ms Cotterill.
For the defendant, Advocate Liam Roffey said there was little he could say to mitigate the evidence.
But Rodrigues had already begun to pay for her crime since she had been on conditional bail, and, as a result, had missed being able to attend funerals of two relatives in Madeira, as well as being unable to visit her father who had suffered a heart attack.
This was the first time she had appeared in any court and was previously a person of ‘impeccable’ character.
Although her guilty pleas were late, the complainant had been spared the need to come to court.
‘The defendant was 24 at the time of the offences and she is struggling to come to terms with the position she finds
herself in,’ said Advocate Roffey.
In passing the sentence of the court, Judge Russell Finch said he and the Jurats were ‘thoroughly disgusted’ at the nature of the offences. ‘This is a picture of sustained and wicked exploitation,’ he told the defendant.
‘Being gullible is not something that should be held against [Ms Cotterill], noting the lengths to which you were prepared to go in order to deceive her.’
Rodrigues received a sentence of two years and eight months for each of the seven counts, to run concurrently.
She was also ordered to pay Ms Cotterill £36,361 in compensation.
Judge Finch said that the court ‘had no hesitation’ in making a recommendation to the Lt-Governor that Rodrigues be deported upon her release.
