STATE OF TASMANIA v JESSIE EMELIA ROBINSON 27 FEBRUARY 2020
COMMENTS ON PASSING SENTENCE BLOW CJ
Jessie Emelia Robinson, you have pleaded guilty to 17 crimes, comprising 5 charges of attempting to dishonestly acquire a financial advantage, 6 charges of forgery, and 6 charges of uttering.
Over a period from August 2016 to February 2018, you made fraudulent applications for a credit card and for five loans, each time using the name of your sister, Brooke Robinson, instead of your own name. These were not sophisticated attempts at fraud. In August 2016, you applied for a Citibank credit card, and you provided information that Brooke Robinson was employed by a business called S J Performance at an address in the suburbs of Burnie. There was no such business. Any bank making enquiries as to the person applying for the loan could very quickly have found out that there was no such business. The application was declined. Time was wasted. No one lost any money.
The second application was for a home loan, again in the name of your sister Brooke. You applied to a company for a loan in the sum of $235,000 saying that you wanted it to buy a house. But, when that lender asked for further information, you did not respond, and, as a result, the application was declined.
The next application was for a loan of $30,000 to buy a car, again in the name of your sister Brooke. That application was also declined. That was in August 2016.
Next, in September 2016, you applied for a loan in the sum of $68,488 to buy a car. Again, the application was in the name of your sister Brooke. Again, you provided information that she was employed by S J Performance. You said the loan was wanted to purchase a vehicle from a company named Motors in Burnie. Subsequently the manager from Motors in Burnie contacted your home, spoke to another of your sisters, and said that he believed you had made a fraudulent loan application in Brooke Robinson’s name. So, you did not fool anyone with that attempt to get a loan.
Then the next fraudulent application, the final one, was in February 2018. After your family had found out what you were up to, you had another go, and applied to another loan company for a loan of $31,298, apparently to buy a car. That application was rejected as fraudulent.
In support of these various applications you forged payslips showing payments of wages by S J Performance to Brooke. You did that on five occasions, and you committed the crime of uttering on five occasions by sending those forged payslips to prospective lenders. In relation to the last fraudulent application, you forged bank statements showing that there was a bank account in the name of your sister Brooke and Stewart Batt, who happened to be your former partner. You committed the crime of uttering by sending the forged the bank statements to the lender that you were trying to defraud.
The impact on the various companies that you tried to deal with was not particularly significant. You wasted their time. There was never much chance of any of them falling for what you were doing and actually lending you any money. But the person who has suffered as a result of all of this is your sister Brooke. It has upset her. It has destroyed her relationship with you. Your conduct has resulted in a situation where companies are extremely reluctant to lend to her. When she applied for a personal loan to buy a car for $10,000, it took her six or seven months and the help of a finance broker, whom she knew through her work, to get approval for that small loan. She has been paying to be placed on a credit reporting system to ensure that no future fraudulent applications are made without her knowledge. She is now getting a similar service for free, but it cost her a little money to do that.
You live in Melbourne. There are penalties that I could impose on you much more conveniently if you lived in Tasmania. You are 25 now. You started this in August 2016 when you were 21. The whole thing suggests a level of immaturity. I am taking that into account. You were in a difficult financial situation, apparently because your partner had left you and taken a lot of possessions that you needed to replace, and I think also left you with a loan debt that became your responsibility.
You have no significant prior convictions. You seem to have stayed out of trouble since you made your last fraudulent loan application about two years ago. You have employment. You are living with your father and members of your extended family. You are undertaking university studies. I need to impose a penalty that reflects the seriousness of what you did. But I do not want to impose one that would interfere with your employment or your studies because you are a young person and you are heading in the right direction.
What I am going to do is impose a penalty that will see you spend the next few days in custody, and then have a suspended sentence hanging over your head. If you re-offend, you could be made to serve that suspended sentence, in addition to any other penalty that you might incur.
I convict you and sentence you to five months’ imprisonment. I suspend all but seven days of that sentence on condition that you commit no offence punishable by imprisonment within three years after your release from prison.