She wanted a life of luxury, but she didn’t want to work for it. A US woman has been sentenced to prison after bankrupting a Holocaust survivor. She took a total of $2.8 million from the 87-year-old man.
As reported by the US news agency Associated Press, among others, the senior and the 36-year-old met in 2017 via a dating platform on which the senior was looking for company. In May of the same year, she asked the successful businessman from New York for money for the first time. The woman, who lived in Florida with her partner and two teenage sons, claimed she had to use it to pay legal fees. That’s how the first $25,000 flowed. Over the next four years, she fed the man more and more lies, getting him to write 62 checks totaling over $2.8 million until he was broke and even had to give up his apartment.
The woman is said to have used the money to pay for expensive trips to Europe and Las Vegas. She also bought an apartment, a boat, jewellery, Rolex watches, designer clothes and numerous cars. The victim found out about her scam only after he confided in his son.
After the man then stopped making the payments, the woman is said to have explained to her partner in a text message that she was not willing to earn money with legal work: “I don’t want to work … it’s too difficult”.
A New York judge sentenced the woman, who pleaded guilty to fraud back in April, to 51 months in prison. She also has to pay back the $2.8 as part of her fine. The victim, whose identity was kept secret, had lost both parents in the Holocaust at the age of 6 and moved to the United States in her early 20s. According to the news agency, he wrote in a letter to the judge: “As a survivor of the Holocaust, I have suffered untold pain and loss in my life, but never could I have imagined that at my age I would be exposed to such heartless betrayal”.
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Sources: Associated Press, CNN
