Pauline thought she had stumbled onto a good deal when her daughter mentioned she had run into a woman who had just started her own travel agency and was eager to get some customers. She said her name was Kelly.
Kelly put together a holiday package for Pauline and her husband, spent a few hours chatting with them at their home and took a €1000 cash payment from Pauline for her services, saying she would be back in a few weeks for the remaining €670. Pauline’s daughter and several of her friends also paid Kelly money to book flights and accommodation for their j1 trip to San Diego. It was when they landed that Pauline began to realise that something was wrong.
“The girls have flown over to San Diego. No accommodation, no nothing. Stranded over there.”
It transpired that Kelly worked for a legitimate travel agency but had branched out on her own. Pauline told Joe that she had planned it so that some people would have holidays that went according to plan.
“A couple of people got a good holiday but that was to put the net out wider to bring in a lot more people.”
When told that Kelly had been hospitalised for a hernia surgery, Pauline and some of the other people who had booked holidays with her did some investigating online and saw that in fact, Kelly had been imprisoned in the UK for committing fraud.
“She had fooled everybody and she comes across like a lovely girl.”
Pauline gave Joe the example of a family who had flown to Canada under one of Kelly’s bookings only to find that they could not get home. They ended up having to fundraise the thousands of euro they needed to get a flight back to Ireland.
“I just think that she’s a sociopath…The amount of money she accumulated was unbelievable.“
Listen back to the whole interview on Liveline here.