Wife wastes $ 680,000 stolen property
The woman this story is about was an accountant at an animal hospital on the Australian island of Tasmania. According to ABC 49-year-old Rachel Naomi Perri used this position to transfer a total of around 680,000 dollars from company accounts to her private account over three years and in 475 individual transactions.
Perri then put all of this incredible sum into the online gambling game “Heart of Vegas”, an online gambling portal. That doesn’t seem unusual at first. Worldwide there are many cases of gambling addiction in which the sick gamble for money, lose it and then keep playing for money – always in the hope of being able to make up for the losses they have suffered one day.
The catch in this case: with “Heart of Vegas” everything is the same as in other online casinos, but with one major exception. There is no money to be won in the game – at least none that can be paid off.
Rather, players buy virtual coins which they can then use to play online and which are only valid in the game. There is no market for the sale of the currency acquired in this way. All Perri could do with the virtual casino coins was: play.
And indeed she did. In three years she lost $ 680,000 in hard currency. It is not known how high their total losses were in virtual currency.
For three years, Perri’s scams went undetected. It was only when she was released in 2019 that the vet discovered “anomalies” on the bank statements. Perri had sought, through creative uses and recipients, to encrypt where the funds were actually going, using “a variety of bank accounts, credit cards, and personal loans on their behalf.”
Because the huge sums from the veterinary clinic were not enough, Perri had also issued a credit card with a limit of $ 30,000 in the name of her husband, who knew nothing about it. Here she amassed another $ 24,000 in casino debt. She also took out several loans in her own name without repaying them.
When the investigators discovered her, she is said to have pleaded guilty almost immediately. She literally “waited for a knock on the door,” she admitted.
Perri has since been diagnosed with severe gambling disorder. However, this does not protect her from punishment – probably also because she had repeatedly committed criminal offenses since she was eighteen. She is now guilty of 25 computer fraud and one credit card fraud case and is due to be convicted by the end of the year. She is already in custody.
