A travel agent has been jailed for three years after scamming a loyalty rewards platform out of nearly £500,000.
Carolyn Braithwaite, 44, defrauded her employer, loyalty Arrivia Europe, by paying faked customer refunds into 63 different bank accounts between October 2018 and February 2021.
Isleworth Crown Court heard that, on average, Braithwaite, of Littlehampton in West Sussex, was stealing £24,000 a month. She paid the cash into accounts under her and her husband’s name.
The mother-of-three admitted fraud by false representation in relation to £491,131.80 and now faces a confiscation hearing on 7 April.
Reporting on the hearing, Court News UK said Judge Martin Edmunds KC noted that Braithwaite had appeared to spend the money supporting her grandparents in her native South Africa and on ‘excessive’ online gambling.
“After a mistake had been made, you identified a route to defraud your employers, and you did, and continued for 20 months,” said Judge Edmunds.
“The fraud was sophisticated and concealed with the use of fake emails and 63 bank accounts, and was sustained over 20 months,” the Judge continued.
Defence counsel Jeffrey Lamb said Braithwaite was stuck in a ‘vortex of decline’ at the time of the offence. He said she had lost her job during COVID and she gambled away part of what she took ‘as a way to get out of this, and to support her grandparents’.
Braithwaite’s grandparents passed away in 2021 around the time the offending stopped, the court heard, though the judge noted that was also when she was made redundant from her job at Arrivia.
Mr Lamb said Braithwaite has three children and a sickly father in this country, for whom she contributes £300 monthly to the NHS for his care, however, she was unable to say where exactly all the money had gone.
After being made redundant by Arrivia Europe in 2021, Braithwaite launched her own travel agency, Let Us Book It, which subsequently failed in August 2024, allegedly owing customers thousands of pounds in refunds.
