My laptop’s so sluggish
A MAN whose laptop wasn’t working was stunned after experts discovered the problem – a melted slug.
Steve Ryder took his Mac to the Apple store after slow performance and an unclear screen.
Engineers opened it up and found a slug melted across the Mac’s motherboard. Steve, 62, had to fork out £469 to get it repaired. He said: “I keep my laptop on a shelf so I’m not sure how it got there or what it was doing.”
She lodged a claim for lost earnings of
£2,500 after claiming she tended to her daughter who was in intensive care and needed several major operations.
But Liverpool Crown Court yesterday heard she does not have a daughter.
Her bogus insurance claim was one of 31 she submitted over seven years in the names of her friends and family to swindle
£139,000.
In another she lied that her pal’s sevenyear-old son had leukaemia.
And in a third she falsely claimed her niece’s elderly mum was housebound after a fall.
Pain’s catalogue of crimes came to light when she tried to cash in on the terror attack.
In May last year suicide bomber Salman Abedi blew himself up at the end of a gig by US singer Ariana
Grande, killing 22 and wounding 139.
But investigators discovered no-one with her daughter’s name was among the victims.
Pain was jailed for two years after she admitted two specimen fraud charges.
Judge Alan Conrad QC told her: “I am sure all rightminded members of the public would be shocked, in particular, that you would use a tragedy which shook the nation as the basis for a fraudulent claim.’’
Pain, of Kirkby, Merseyside, had worked for an insurance broker since she was 16.
She oversaw a section of the business which provided insurance for medical professionals to cover unexpected loss of earnings.
The judge said she had “used false documents” to support bogus claims and “such was the trust in which you were held they were never challenged”.
Michael Bagley, defending, said Pain was still in debt despite her fraud. “How she got to this point is still difficult to understand,’’ he said.
Det Cons Ant Andrews of the City Of London Police’s fraud department said: “Pain exploited the tragic terror attack at the Manchester Arena, as well as other examples of human suffering, to make a financial gain.’’