Former Thomson trainee jailed for ‘jetset’ fraud
A former Thomson Travel trainee has been jailed for 16 months for conning £70,000 out of Thomson and another travel agent in a ‘jetset’ fraud.
The teenager, who fraudulently booked flights and luxury hotels around the world, was compared by his own solicitor to Frank Abagnale Jnr, whose story was turned into Hollywood film ‘Catch Me If You Can’.
Reece Scobie, 19, joined a Perth branch of Thomson Travel as a trainee and within weeks was fraudulently booking himself business class flights and round-the-world trips by accessing accounts and passwords.
He was sacked by Thomson after a couple of months but continued to use passwords to book flights and hotels, conning the agency out of a total of just over £11,000.
On one of his trips, he was in a British Airways airport lounge and spotted that the previous user of a computer, who worked for Cambridge Business Travel, had not properly logged off.
This allowed him to gain access to the company’s booking system and use it to book more trips.
He was able to con Cambridge Travel out of almost £60,000 in just 11 days.
While he was being investigated, he even managed to dupe court staff into handing back his passport which had been confiscated as a condition of bail. He used fake documents to persuade them he had been given another job in travel and needed his passport.
The teenager, who was living with his mother in Rait, Perthshire, was finally caught while on a trip to Los Angeles.
Perth Sheriff Court was told that Scobie, described as a borderline technology genius, had carried out the fraud to fund a "fantasy" globetrotting lifestyle.
In his defence, Scobie’s solicitor said he suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
According to the BBC, Sheriff Lindsay Foulis said it wasn’t an easy case to sentence because of the conditions suffered, but he felt a jail sentence was appropriate.
Scobie has been detained for 16 months at Perth Sheriff Court.
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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