Justice has confirmed a sentence of one year and nine months in prison for the owner of a false English academy, called ‘Your Future in Australia’, for swindling 13,500 euros from three students who paid for some English courses in that country that they never existed. The Court of Madrid understands that both she and her partner, who could not be prosecuted for being unaccounted for, attracted clients for their center while they knew that their accounts had a hole of more than 100,000 dollars and that the status of the company was “ruinous”. The scam, according to various foreign media, spread to other countries such as Colombia.
Justice condemns the owner of an opposition academy who took more than 30,000 euros from his students
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The three victims who have brought this false language academy to the bench described a similar situation before the Justice after denouncing the scam. They contacted them after seeing their advertising campaigns on Facebook and YouTube. “We are specialists in helping and advising many people who, like us, want to travel to Australia in search of an opportunity to study, live and work,” said the couple who own the company in her profile. “Go on an adventure, get to know Australia,” they explained in their photographs.
The three contacted them and spoke for months with the accused through Skype and video calls. She was the one who gave them all the information and made them see that the company was reliable although, says the sentence, she did it “knowing that the contracted services were never going to be carried out.” When the money from his victims reached the company accounts, they disappeared. “Not only did they not perform the contracted service, but they stopped maintaining contact, eliminating any trace of the aforementioned company,” the resolution states.
The three victims contacted ‘Your Future in Australia’ between January and December 2016. By then, according to documentation collected in the case, the state of the company was in financial ruin. The defendant’s own defense provided a letter directed by an accountant that in June 2016 reported a loss of $59,000 during that quarter and a total loss of more than $100,000 in just one year. “This aspect is not very beneficial for your business,” she told them.
One of the victims paid 4,711 euros, another 4,353 euros and the last 4,491 euros, leaving a total fraud of 13,555 euros that the Justice forces to return. The sentence of the Court of Madrid, to which elDiario.es has had access, confirms the sentence of one year and nine months in prison that was imposed by a criminal court in the capital for a crime of fraud, in addition to the obligation to return the money to the three victims. A sentence that does not imply his compulsory entry into prison and that is still appealable before the criminal chamber of the Supreme Court.
Sources of the case explain to this newspaper that the partner of the convicted woman, who according to the sentence managed ‘Your Future in Australia’ half with her, could not be tried as her whereabouts are unknown. Different Colombian and Australian media have pointed out in recent years a much larger scam than the one included in this sentence of the Madrid Court. This article from the Australian outlet ABC News He speaks, for example, of 100 students who would have lost close to a million dollars with this company located in Brisbane. More than half of the victims, he says, came from countries like Colombia and Brazil.
The Spanish and Australian authorities were also involved in the matter. In March 2017 The Foreign Ministry issued a note in which he spoke of a “possible case of fraud” in this agency that, he said, “has been reported by numerous injured parties who claim to have been victims of fraud having lost amounts paid.” Already at that time, the Spanish authorities urged those potentially affected to contact the Australian government’s public education agency, the Overseas Students Ombudsman. Australian media explained that this agency had received more than 40 complaints by then.
“I was aware of the dilapidated situation”
In the case of the three swindled in Madrid, Justice understands that the convicted woman knew perfectly well that she was selling some English courses in Australia that did not exist and that all her money was going to the company’s monumental debt. She was the one who, according to the judges, convinced her victims “providing them with wrong information and assuring them of the reliability of the company.” Information that, according to the sentence, she knew “did not conform to reality at all” since she “had exact knowledge of the dilapidated situation of the company.”
The convicted woman claimed in her defense that she “was just a worker” who provided budgets to make offers to students, something that the judges do not believe after examining all the evidence. “She knew that the contracts that were concluded could not be fulfilled, since the transfers would not be used for the intended purpose, but to cover one of the multiple debts that weighed on society,” explains the ruling.
The Provincial Court of Madrid also does not doubt that it is a crime of fraud, rejecting the allegation of the accused that everything was a consequence of the “lack of assets and liquidity” of the company. She was “fully aware of the dilapidated state in which the company found itself”, despite what she continued doing her job “of attracting clients, convincing them to sign and make the corresponding transfers despite knowing positively that the contracts would not be fulfilled and that contractors would never get their money back.”
