Imagine missing out on tickets to your favourite artist or music event, only to find someone selling one at cost-price on Facebook or Gumtree.
You message the person offering the ticket and they confirm it's still available and all yours if you send over the cash.
Advert
You transfer the cash ASAP and then get excited for said event.
Only when you're dressed and ready, travel out to the event location with your mates, your ticket doesn't seem to scan right and the attendant tells you it's a fake. Really sh*tty behaviour from the person who sold you the ticket right?
Well, imagine that same person who gave you the fake ticket did the same thing to dozens of people, got caught, but wasn't sent to jail.
That's the scenario that has just happened to Western Australian teen Hannah Valentine, who has been convicted of 53 separate fraud offences, according to ABC News.
Advert
The 19-year-old used Facebook and Gumtree to scam tons of people into thinking they were buying tickets to Post Malone or Sets on the Beach and Listen Out music festivals.
She managed to get a whopping $4,000 from people and used a bunch of aliases on social media to get away with it. Valentine would either post ads on the two platforms or target people who had expressed interest in the events.
Once the money was transferred to her account, she would disappear and the would-be recipient got nothing. Other times, the teen would send tickets she knew were invalid, meaning some people wouldn't haven known until it was too late.
Advert
In addition to this trickery, Valentine bought $5,000 worth of beauty products, clothes, festival tickets, fast-food and ride-share trips after she nicked a credit card from a client at the beauty salon she used to work for.
Magistrate Thomas Hall was particularly scathing of Valentine's criminal enterprise, telling the teen: "This was a scam, purely and simply a scam motivated by Ms Valentine's greed and selfishness.
"Not only did she take their hard-earned cash but she deceived them.
"Some of those people would have even gotten dressed up and attended only to be turned away at the gate, shattering their expectations of having a good day or a good time."
The court was told that Valentine wanted to become a nurse however the charges against her meant her application was rejected. She has also lost her job, her friends and her boyfriend because of the crimes.
Her defence added that some people laugh at her in the streets.
The Magistrate took those points into consideration as well as her age and the fact it's her first offence and sentenced her to a 12-month intensive supervision order which included 240 hours of community service.
Featured Image Credit: Hannah Valentine/Facebook