A 37-year-old self-em­ployed woman re­ceived bail with sure­ty of $30,000 when she ap­peared be­fore a mag­is­trate yes­ter­day on three charges of fraud­u­lent con­ver­sion to­tal­ing $25,000.

The ac­cused, sched­uled to reap­pear in court on 25 Jan­u­ary 2025, al­leged­ly ac­cept­ed pay­ments from three peo­ple in­to a bank ac­count for trav­el pur­pos­es.

Two peo­ple trans­ferred $6,565 each, and one per­son trans­ferred $11,200. The trips were resched­uled with no up­dates on ac­com­mo­da­tions or air­fare as promised, and re­quests for re­funds proved un­suc­cess­ful. To date, one per­son re­ceived on­ly part of the re­fund, with ef­forts to re­cov­er the re­main­ing bal­ance un­suc­cess­ful.

Po­lice con­duct­ed en­quiries, lead­ing to charges against the sus­pect on 8 No­vem­ber 2024 for the fol­low­ing of­fences:

1. Fraud­u­lent con­ver­sion in the sum of $6,565

2. Fraud­u­lent con­ver­sion in the sum of $6,565

3. Fraud­u­lent con­ver­sion in the sum of $11,200

The Fraud Squad ad­vis­es va­ca­tion­ers and trav­ellers to ver­i­fy the le­git­i­ma­cy and ca­pa­bil­i­ty of trav­el agen­cies or in­di­vid­u­als of­fer­ing book­ings be­fore mak­ing pay­ments.