A fraudster was jailed today after witnesses identified him on Cleveland Police’s website as he used a vulnerable pensioner’s stolen bank card in banks and stores.
Carl Sowerby, 26, from Middlesbrough, had done gardening work for the 73-year-old woman who was described as confused and forgetful by her worried family.
She was receiving four visits a day from carers and visiting her 83-year-old stroke victim husband in hospital when Sowerby burgled her home in the town.
He later tried to cash cheques from her cheque book for thousands of pounds by asking friends to put them through their bank accounts, and he was caught on CCTV in banks, bookies and food stores drawing cash and paying for goods with her credit card.
Prosecutor Sue Jacobs told Teesside Crown Court that CCTV footages of him at the TSB in Redcar, HSBC in Ormesby, and a Farm Foods store were put on the Cleveland Police website.
The police were alerted in July last year after the woman’s niece found a note from her saying that she could not find the card.
The woman said that she had given her bank details to a man who had come to the door, and her carer informed the police.
Then the woman said that the upstairs of her house was a mess, and the niece discovered that there had been a burglary.
Mrs Jacobs said that the police checked the woman’s bank account and they found that a lot transactions had been carried out in Redcar at various stores before the July 5 burglary.
Police checked CCTV at the stores and they saw Sowerby making the transactions, and there were CCTV recordings of him at other stores.
On July 10 last year police received a call from the niece saying that she had seen her aunt at the front door talking to a man, and she asked him what he was doing. He said that he was a friend and he told the niece to chill out.
She took a photograph of him on her mobile phone, and she later discovered a cheque stub for £13,000 in her aunt’s chequebook and a completed cheque for £3,000 which had not been removed.
She asked her aunt who he was and she said that he was a gardener.
Sowerby later asked a woman friend to cash a cheque for £5,000, which she put into her bank account. She was later told a picture of him was on the police website.
A man who had known Sowerby for nine years said that he asked him to put a cheque for £13,000 through his bank account.
Duncan McReddie, defending, said that Sowerby felt ashamed and degraded by his behaviour, and he had a degree of insight into the harm that he had caused.
He said that Sowerby had turned to drink and drugs after the break-up of a relationship, and he had committed the thefts and fraud to fund them.
Judge Peter Bowers, who rejected a defence plea for a suspended sentence, told Sowerby: “The problem with this case is the number of offences and the fact that this lady was certainly vulnerable and somewhat confused.”
Sowerby, of Ainsworth Way, Spencerbeck, Middlesbrough, was jailed for 30 months after he pleaded guilty to 22 charges of fraud, three specimen offences of theft and the burglary in June and July last year.
