Kaylie McGrath, 39, admitted five counts of fraud and one of theft when she appeared in the Magistrate’s Court from custody.
The court was told how a female victim had been contacted by her bank to tell her she was overdrawn. She became aware of payments that she had not made and an investigation began.
It was established that McGrath had used the woman’s bank details, and those of another woman, to make rental payments on a States house to which she had had a connection.
The court was told that how McGrath came to get those bank details would not be read out but it was included in the Probation report. She also used one of the women’s bank details to pay for goods at Sure, the Blue Diamond Group, and the Rohais Chinese takeaway.
The total amount involved was just short of £2,000.
The court heard how McGrath had given her maiden name when calling one of the victims in an attempt to resolve the matter without the need for police intervention.
And after police seized her phone they found internet searches asking what she should do having used someone’s bank card without permission.
On a separate occasion she went to the Coop store at Rue des Goddards, Castel. While the cashier’s back was turned she stole 23 scratch cards valued at a total of £230 from by the till. Her actions were captured on CCTV.
In interview she said she was addicted to gambling. She had won on some of the cards but could not remember what she had done with the winnings.
In June this year she had been ordered to perform 140 hours of community service for three counts of using the bank card of a person for whom she had been a carer without her permission to buy things for herself, plus five months in prison, suspended for two years, for one count of benefit fraud.
Defending Advocate Sam Maindonald said that when being sentenced in June, no probation order had been included, so her client had been released in to the community with no added tools to assist her. The latest offences had all been ‘mindless’ acts that were not pre-meditated.
Judge Sarah Brehaut said it would be ‘woefully inadequate’ to say that she was disappointed to see the defendant back in court again so soon after her previous offending.
‘You have a problem,’ she told the defendant.
She said the offences were mean, dishonest, and had caused considerable distress to the victims.
The court was told that the banks had reimbursed the victims for their losses in relation to the fraud matters.
Judge Brehaut revoked the community service order, and a prison sentence of three months was imposed for the theft from the Coop along with an order to pay £230 compensation.
The first of the fraud matters attracted a sentence of three months, consecutive, with the remainder three months concurrent.
The suspended prison sentence was activated but reduced to four months, taking the total sentence length to 10 months.