Woman posed as Horse & Hound agent to steal advertisers’ cash
A THIEF who was banned from every equestrian event in the country posed as a Horse & Hound magazine employee to steal from advertisers, a court has heard.
Charmaine Mcallister, 31, pretended that she worked for the weekly maga- zine to steal the bank card details of its customers. The mother of two, of Huddersfield, West Yorks, bought cars and cosmetic surgery worth thousands of pounds.
Mcallister was previously described as a “plague to the whole horse indus- try”, and banned from every equestrian event in the country after stealing from female riders while they competed. She was jailed for those thefts in 2015.
Appearing at Kirklees magistrates’ court via a prison video link after her latest offending spree, she pleaded guilty to 15 charges of fraud. The offences took place between Nov 29 last year and Jan 15.
Mcallister pretended she was from the Horse & Hound advertising team and identified victims through adverts placed in the publication.
She would contact them to say their payments for the advertising had not gone through. She then tricked them into handing over their bank card details, using them to buy thousands of pounds worth of items, including lip fillers from a cosmetic surgery firm in Leeds, two Vauxhall Astras, a Citroen DS3 and a Seat Ibiza.
She will be sentenced at a later date.