Jail for fake baker who conned thousands from friends
One victim so stressed he attempted suicide
A BAKER was branded a ‘thoroughly dishonest woman’ as she was jailed for defrauding friends out of thousands of pounds - while her ‘freshlybaked bread’ was warmed on radiators to ‘trick customers’.
Francesca Barker-Mills opened The Barker Baker in Littleborough, Rochdale, in 2015.
The new business venture was built on the pretence that BarkerMills was turning her life around, having ‘fallen in love with baking on a probation course’ after she narrowly escaped jail in 2013 due to a number of fraud convictions.
Barker-Mills told friends and even advertised in local newspapers that her bakery was a social enterprise - showing people that ex-offenders could contribute to their community in earnest.
But in fact Barker-Mills used the bakery to convince potential investors, her landlord and even her ‘friends’, into sinking thousands of their hard-earned cash into a government scheme - which she had invented.
Barker-Mills has now been jailed for two years and three months after pleading guilty to four counts of fraud.
At a sentencing hearing on Thursday, Minshull Street Crown Court heard how the fake baker lied time and again to those wanting to do a good deed by investing in a fledgling local business.
Barker-Mills, 32, would tell people that she was involved in a government-run ‘matched funding
The Barker Bakery in Littleborough
scheme’ designed to encourage new investors, whereby people could send money to her account and it would be matched pound for pound by the government. Barker-Mills tricked her new investors into believing they ‘would double their money’ if they left thousands of pounds in her account to ‘mature’ over a period of a few months. After that, she would send them their investment, plus the extra cash ‘the government had funded’ as part of the fake scheme. When the money never arrived, she persuaded them into giving more cash and sent screenshots of what appeared to be her bank account, sometimes with more than £100,000 in it, as ‘proof’ that she could pay out. She peddled the fib that she had been given a £40,000 contract to star in a BBC documentary about how she had ‘turned her life around’, as well as saying she had been ‘given council money’ to teach children schools how bake.
Again, this s money never arrived in the hands of the investors, ors, prosecutor James Preece told the court.
Eventually they reported her to the police. By the time Barker-Mills was prosecuted, she had defrauded four people, from 2015 to 2017, and fooled them into giving her more than £60,000 in total.
The claimants who suffered the highest loss were a couple from Rochdale who had wanted to support a local business that had a ‘good message behind it’. Altogether, they lost £30,950.
Another of Barker-Mills’ victims was hired by her as a bakery assistant. He told the court how BarkerMills would buy bread in from wholesalers and ‘ warm it on the radiator’ to convince shoppers it had just come out of the oven.
The fraudster also ‘ bullied’ her employee into loaning her thousands for a holiday, saying that ‘she was depressed’ and ‘needed some time away’. The stress of her lies drove him to attempt suicide.
Julian Goode, defending, argued in to
that BarkerM i l ls shou ld receive a susuicide suspended sentence, saying she could be ‘rehabilitated’ in the community. He also added that she had been diagnosed with an emotionally unstable personality disorder, which could ‘provide context’ to the crimes.
But the judge said the offending caused such a high level of harm - as well as being Barker-Mills’ second time in court facing fraud charges - that there was no option but to jail her immediately.
Barker-Mills, of Greengate, Salford, appeared stone-faced as she was handed a 27-month sentence.
Her Honour Judge Sophie McKone said: “You are a thoroughly dishonest woman who made up a scheme to defraud people.
“Cynically, you portrayed yourself as someone who had turned their life around - that was your unique selling point, saying you were an honest baker but you were actually far from it.”
You are a thoroughly dishonest woman who made up a scheme to defraud people Judge Sophie McKone