A law graduate who defrauded a pair of doting grandparents in a bid to prop up her fledgling career as a music teacher has found herself behind bars.
Fiona Trayner was jailed for eight months after a sheriff said he had no alternative in light of a previous conviction for a similar offence.
The 43-year-old, of Gowans Terrace, Perth, had been giving £20-a-time music lessons to her elderly victims’ granddaughter when she got into financial difficulties.
Perth Sheriff Court was told she had taken on premises in a bid to expand her businesses but when money had become tight she had emptied her employers’ bank account.
She crudely doctored a £20 cheque with a felt-tip pen, changing the amount to instead read £2,000, before presenting the cheque to her landlord, with whom she was in arrears.
When questions were asked about the state of the cheque, she said they had been written by someone with dyslexia.
The cheque was successfully cashed and when the deceit apparently went unnoticed, she decided to repeat it the following month.
This time the £20 cheque was altered to read £1,020 and once again it was successfully passed off and cashed by her unknowing landlord.
It was only when one of the pensioners checked his bank account some days later that he discovered that the £1,500 minimum he expected to be there was missing. Instead he discovered he was £500 overdrawn.
When the bank was informed it was able to track down copies of the cheques and spot that additional zeroes had been added.
The complainers contacted Trayner to ask her to explain, but she initially denied altering the cheques, claiming that they had “gone missing”.
Appearing at Perth Sheriff Court, Trayner pleaded guilty to two charges of altering cheques between February 21 and April 30 last year, changing the sum of £20 to £1,020 and £2,000.
Solicitor Cliff Culley said his client had been feeling under pressure from her landlord and had been concealing her financial troubles from her husband.
He claimed she had been “sticking her head in the sand” and had expected the cheques would be rejected by the bank.
Instead, he said the effort was more about “buying time”, commenting that the crude alteration to the cheques demonstrated “how pathetic the attempt was”.
That version of events was rejected by Sheriff Lindsay Foulis, however, who said it was clear that having succeeded once, she had tried the same ploy for a second time and succeeded once again.
He also drew attention to a similar offence relating to the sum of £2,500 which he said had earned her a sentence of imprisonment in England.
Sheriff Foulis said he believed she had hoped that as her targets were elderly they may have failed to pick up on her actions.
“Another matter which exacerbates this is that you are a recent university graduate, with an honours law degree from Anglia University,” he said.
“That indicates you are a woman with some intellectual ability and says to me that you knew what you were up to. I consider it entirely appropriate I impose a custodial sentence.”