Serial con-artist Judith Douglas, 57, has been sentenced to more than six-and-a-half years in prison for scamming potential tenants out of thousands of dollars in rent deposits on a single property.
Grand Court Justice Cheryll Richards delivered the 80-month jail sentence on Wednesday morning as Douglas sat in the courtroom sobbing.
Richards said Douglas had targeted “vulnerable” victims – low-income work-permit holders – when she advertised a rental unit at Diaz Lane in George Town and took deposits from them, even though the property already had a tenant.
Some of those individuals had earlier submitted victim impact statements to the court. The judge referred to a couple of those statements when she passed sentence, including that of a Filipino man who paid Douglas more than $3,400 on behalf of himself and five others to secure the apartment.
“He said what happened was very stressful for him,” Richards said. “He became depressed… At the time it happened, he had been supporting his family in the Philippines and his fiancée who had lost her job.”
She also spoke of another man, a Jamaican national, who paid Douglas $4,600 from his savings and from a loan from a friend. “He had to seek a further loan from his employer in order to find alternative accommodation,” she said.
Richards described Douglas as having a high risk of reoffending in light of the fact that she had been previously convicted of similar types of crimes.
She also told Douglas she needed to be protected from herself and that the public needed to be protected from her.
Douglas had earlier admitted she stole nearly $70,000 from a string of victims in a rental scam that left them homeless and scrambling for cash.
In August last year, she entered 28 guilty pleas, six partial guilty pleas, and four not guilty pleas to 36 counts of obtaining property by deception.
She claimed to have squandered the proceeds in Cayman’s illegal ‘gambling dens’.
During a sentencing hearing on 21 Feb., she submitted a letter of apology for her crimes and insisted she was seeking help for her gambling addiction.
Richards ordered time already served in custody by Douglas be subtracted from her 80-month sentence. She had been on remand since March last year.
The victims in the case are seeking compensation, though Richards noted that, at this stage, there was no evidence that Douglas had the means to pay this. The prosecution has given notice that it intends to pursue confiscation proceedings.
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