Brazen offender’s skilful frauds
Property and cash totalling almost $10,000 was lost when a handbag snatcher teamed up with a brazen fraudster.
The fraudster, 23-year-old Shannon Caroline Hammond, reached the end of her seven-month crime spree with a three-year nine-month jail term imposed in the Christchurch District Court today.
The alleged purse snatcher, also a woman, is pleading not guilty and going separately through the court system. She is on bail.
Hammond denies having a drugs problem. The court was told that committed the crimes because she “wanted nice things for herself and her children”.
Once she gets her hands on stolen chequebooks and bank cards, the rest is apparently easy, according to the frank interview she had with the probation officer before her sentencing.
She comes across as confident, unabashed, plausible, and articulate, a “nefarious skill” that has allowed her to get the cash and goods she wants from banks and retailers.
Hammond also accepts that the same skill has “painted her back into jail”, the report says.
Judge Alistair Garland reckoned that cash and goods totalling between $9000 and $10,000 were taken in Hammond’s fraudulent offending between December and July, and another $7000 worth of goods – some of sentimental value and irreplaceable – was taken in a burglary of a Main North Road property.
Jailing her, he said she would have no chance of paying reparations to the victim so he made no order.
Hammond had pleaded guilty to burglary, theft, dishonestly using documents, attempting to dishonestly use documents, driving while forbidden, breaches of bail, breach of prison release conditions, and possession of a pipe for smoking methamphetamine – a total of 46 charges.
Police prosecutor Chris Hunt said many of the offences had been committed while Hammond was on bail.
Defence counsel Richard McGuire said there had been a degree of bravado displayed in Hammond’s comments to the probation officer. She had only acknowledged a drug problem “to an extent”.
Judge Garland increased her jail term for her bad list of previous convictions, which includes 18 dishonesty offences including eight for taking or dishonestly using documents, and two burglaries. He allowed a reduction for her guilty pleas, which had been entered when she had been eventually remanded in custody and when conviction was almost inevitable.
She had been released from prison in May 2014 after a sentence imposed for burglary, unlawfully getting into a car, shoplifting, fraud, possession of methamphetamine, and failing to answer bail.
Category: News
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