fraudulently<\/a> sold holidays, reporting them to be ATOL and ABTA protected, the force said.(Pictured: stock image of a beach)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n‘You mercilessly abused the trust of your nearest and dearest in their darkest hours and set about targeting other vulnerable people of your acquaintance who trusted you in order to satisfy your relatively lavish lifestyle.<\/p>\n
‘This involved lavish holidays, an expensive car and designer goods.<\/p>\n
‘The extent of the betrayal of your own mother is truly breathtaking.<\/p>\n
‘As you gallivanted around your mother’s utility bills went unpaid and county court judgements rained down upon her.<\/p>\n
‘Bailiffs visited her home, unbeknown to her because you deviously arranged to take her away on visits on the days they were to arrive.<\/p>\n
‘I take the view that you are a thoroughly callous individual.’<\/p>\n
Tony Davis, mitigating, said: ‘Once she began riding the monster of deceit it was inevitable it would come crashing down and it did.’<\/p>\n
Barlow squandered the cash handed to her on designer clothes, prestige cars and holidays for her and her immediate family, with exclusive breaks in Dubai being her chosen retreat.<\/p>\n
The charges stated that Barlow made false representations by purporting to be an ABTA and ATOL registered travel agent when in fact she was using criminal cash to finance further frauds.<\/p>\n
Money handed over by customers was being used to pay for holidays that subsequent clients booked through her, in a Ponzi-type scheme.<\/p>\n
But her jugging over other people’s cash came crashing down in 2020 when police were called in.<\/p>\n
Furious customers were arriving at her home even as officers moved in to arrest her.<\/p>\n
She used her ‘cancer’ as a shield to fend off angry people she had conned.<\/p>\n
In an email she told one customer who was chasing a refund for a<\/p>\n
holiday: ‘Unfortunately I’ve just found out my cancer has spread and it’s gone to stage 3\/4 in my bones and need to have chemo out into my spine to stop it from getting into my brain. It’s going to be pretty intense.’<\/p>\n
Detective Sergeant Alan Meehan from Durham Police Complex Fraud Team led the investigation.<\/p>\n
He said: ‘At the time of her arrest we were aware that she was telling people she had cancer and at that time we kept an open mind on whether that was correct or not not.<\/p>\n
‘As part of the investigation we asked to access her medical records and it was only then that the truth emerged that she had been making the whole thing up.<\/p>\n
‘It was a determined and calculated attempt to distract attention from her crimes and deflect blame away from her because she hoped people would feel sorry for her.<\/p>\n
‘The lengths she went to were very unusual.It came as a massive shock to her husband that she did not in fact have cancer.<\/p>\n
‘She wore a scarf over her head and appeared to be losing her hair, although we believe she was cutting off strands and scattering it across her pillow at night to keep up that deception.<\/p>\n
‘Members of her family were even taking her to hospital appointments that never existed.<\/p>\n
When she was first arrested in September 2020 she presented as a very frail and sick woman, walking with a stick and with her head in a black scarf to cover the apparent hair loss.<\/p>\n
‘Once confronted by the medical information she had no option but to admit she’d been lying.<\/p>\n
‘The second custody photograph from when she was re-arrested in 2021 show the true picture, with no sign or suggestion of illness.<\/p>\n
‘In our opinion it’s a serious aggravating factor in the largest case of fraud this force has ever dealt with.<\/p>\n
‘Lyne Barlow was trying to attain a lifestyle she could not afford and rather than stop as she got out of her depth she continued to take money from more and more victims.<\/p>\n
‘The number of calls we received on this case was unprecedented and once they started coming in they were so many that we had to set up a dedicated email as the control room was in danger of being overrun.’<\/p>\n
James Lewis, of the Crown Prosecution Service said: ‘Barlow acted with greed, using false promises and deceptive lies, to convince family and friends, as well as hundreds of customers, who all trusted her, to part with their money so that she could sustain her own lavish lifestyle.<\/p>\n
‘Fraud is an insidious crime and the cost to the many victims in this case has not just been financial; it has also caused huge emotional distress and extreme disappointment to devastated customers who had to find out their holiday did not actually exist at a time when the country was in the grips of the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
‘Thanks to the thorough investigation by Durham Police and to all the victims who came forward to report her, we were able to bring Barlow to justice.<\/p>\n
‘We will now be taking steps to recover this money taken through Proceeds of Crime legislation.’<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A travel agent faked\u00a0 while defrauding more than 1,400 customers has been jailed at Durham Crown Court for nine years. Lyne Barlow, 39, was ‘riding the monster of deceit’ as she used her fake illness to deflect the avalanche of complaints from devastated families whose holidays failed to materialise. She was so determined to continue […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1762,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[297],"tags":[273],"dealstore":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gavki.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4518"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gavki.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gavki.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gavki.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1762"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gavki.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4518"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gavki.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4519,"href":"https:\/\/gavki.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4518\/revisions\/4519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gavki.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gavki.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gavki.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4518"},{"taxonomy":"dealstore","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gavki.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dealstore?post=4518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}