Cold caller hounded elderly couple to death says judge
She harassed them daily offering to advertise their holiday home – and left them more than £74,000 in debt
A COLD caller ‘hounded an elderly couple to their deaths’, contacting them daily for months and leaving them £74,000 in debt, a court heard.
Barbara Stone, described as a ‘figure of horror’ to pensioners John and Olga Moyle, convinced the couple to place adverts in a magazine for the small holiday home they owned in France.
The 62-year-old persuaded ‘frail’ Mr Moyle to hand over £8,000 a month for almost a year, falsely promising that non-existent sponsors would reimburse the money.
But not a single booking for the property, near Nice, was ever made – and the Moyles were forced to sell the home they had lived in for 50 years to pay off their massive debts.
Grandmother Mrs Moyle, 84, died just a month after the house was placed on the market in 2011. And her husband, who had pleaded with Stone to stop hounding them, died four years later at the age of 83.
Stone, of Leicester, admitted two counts of fraud by false representation and was handed a 22-month suspended jail term at Nottingham Crown Court. Judge Stuart Rafferty told her she had ‘made people’s lives a misery’, and ‘hounded [the Moyles] to death’. Stone, who worked for Leicester-based lifestyle magazine Aspire, did not make money from the fraud herself. She first contacted retired teacher Mr Moyle in early 2010, offering to advertise stays in the two-bed holiday home he and his wife owned.
For the next ten months she inundated the couple with calls, pressuring them into taking out more adverts. Mrs Moyle, also a former teacher, was suffering from cancer at the time – and it was claimed Stone’s relentless calls from as early as 7.45am meant her husband could not care for her properly.
Mr Moyle spent all the cash he had taken from an equity release scheme on his home on the worthless adverts, lost his savings and ran up credit card debts. The couple gave £74,139 to Stone’s firm – and were also conned out of thousands more by another, Wyvern Media, which Stone had previously worked for.
After Mrs Moyle’s death, her husband sold their home in the village of Cleeton St Mary, Shropshire, and moved into a smaller property in nearby Ludlow with the financial help of his daughter Franny, 52.
She said: ‘I completely agree with the judge – [my parents] were hounded to death. My mother was
‘The last year of her life was agony’
ill – but the last year of her life on this earth was an utter agony. Stone would ring every day, putting my father under huge pressure – harassing him, when he should have been looking after his poorly wife.
‘How she got them so enthralled remains a mystery but she managed to press some button. Perhaps they were of a generation where they were just too polite to say no, I don’t know.’ Miss Moyle, a writer and TV executive producer who lives in London, said her father had died ‘in the midst of misery, feeling he had brought this disaster on the family’. She added: ‘He cried himself to sleep for the last years of his life.’
The scam finally came to an end in November 2010 after Miss Moyle discovered what was happening to her parents and called police and Trading Standards. By then, they had lost £97,024 thanks to the actions of both Stone and Wyvern Media, which saw five directors jailed last year for mis-selling advertising space to hundreds of victims.
Mother-of-three Miss Moyle said she did not know how Stone got her father’s details, but thought it may have been through previous adverts he placed in another magazine.
Stone’s second fraud charge related to another victim, 64-yearold Jutta Patterson, who ran a dog rescue home in Shropshire and lost £14,100. Like the Moyles, she died before she could see Stone in court.