According to MailOnline, Kate Ringer invented a story about losing her daughter in order to steal money from strangers. The 19-year-old, who doesn’t have any children, shockingly also stole images on Facebook of other people’s children to validate her story.
According to her YouCaring fundraising page, Kate wrote about needing money to help pay for her child’s funeral costs and her other children’s special dietary requirements.
Juliet Donovan, prosecuting, said: "A fundraising page set up by Miss Ringer on YouCaring.com makes reference to the death of a child and requests donations for funeral arrangements. Five successful donations were made. All the pleas made for donations were found to be completely unfounded. The total value of the fraud was £3,000 including a number of unknown victims who donated."
Judge Samantha Leigh, said: 'You preyed on the generosity of the British public. We all know how generous the public can be and how vast amounts of money can be raised - you only have to look at Children In Need and last Friday's Comic Relief for examples. What you did only has one word and that is wicked. You spun a web of lies to draw these people in and played on their emotions to extort money they could ill-afford to donate."
