The party is over for high-flyers
WADS of cash, designer bags and luxury hotels — this high-flying couple was rolling in it and they took the photos to prove it. Yesterday their decadent life, funded by a sophisticated online scam worth almost $1m, came to a crashing end. Michael Tozer and Angela Greer (left) were sentenced in court. WHAT WAS THEIR PUNISHMENT?
THEY lived a million-dollar lifestyle paid for with other people’s money.
Michael Tozer and Angela Greer took pleasure in taking photos of each other surrounded by cash and luxury items, the proceeds of a sophisticated online scam totalling $950,000.
Tozer created thousands of fake accounts on Paypal, eBay and Gumtree, which he used to buy and sell non-existent goods.
Their arrest at the ShangriLa Hotel in August 2016 prompted a large scale police probe resulting in 15,000 exhibits including notebooks filled with thousands of aliases, multiple bank cards and 62 Australia Post Load and Go cards.
CIB Detective Sergeant Brad McLeish said a six-month investigation unearthed more than 1100 bank accounts, 700 of which were in Tozer’s name and the rest under alias names.
“From all those bank accounts you could just see Paypal money pouring into them,” Det Sgt McLeish said.
They spent the money on extended stays at five-star hotels, lavish overseas trips to Indonesia and Singapore and luxury goods including high end labels like Versace and Rolex.
“He (Tozer) was ultimately caught red handed in possession of all of the tainted property,” Crown Prosecutor Melanie Franklin said.
While Tozer took the fall as the mastermind, pleading guilty to fraud, the Cairns Dis- trict Court was told that Greer lived off the scammed money.
She pleaded guilty to five counts of dealing with identification information.
Greer provided Tozer with details of five people known to them including her husband’s mother, father and stepmother. Her lawyer Joseph Jacobs painted a tragic picture of her childhood.
But Ms Franklin said Greer was someone who had pretended to be a doctor and claimed to have various types of cancer and little weight could be placed on “tragic upbringing”.
Defence barrister Peter Feeney, for Tozer, said this was not the case of organised or gang fraud. His client had always had an interest in mathematics.
“What’s said to be sophisticated is just basic transactions. There’s just so many of them,” Mr Feeney said.
Both have already spent about 19 months in jail. Greer received three months jail, and because she had already served more time than her sentence, she walked free. Tozer received eight years and will be eligible for parole next March.