Bidders cheated out of £9,000 (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Bidders cheated out of £9,000

A CYBER cheat who pocketed thousand of pounds by offering festival tickets for sale on eBay has been jailed.

Christopher Whitnall conned people into parting with cash for tickets for last summer's Reading Festival that he didn't have.

And rather than accept the highest offer on the internet auction site, the 26-year-old took money from every bidder and never sent any tickets out.

Between May 18 and July 29 last year he cheated at least 25 people out of sums from £155 to £538, fleecing them out of more than £9,000.

Claire Marlow, prosecuting, told Swindon Crown Court that Whitnall offered tickets mainly to the Reading Festival but to other events as well.

He had used an email account registered at his work on the Cheney Manor Industrial Estate to market the tickets.

Whitnall claimed the tickets offered the holders the chance to meet the stars after the show, have a privileged place to pitch their tent and use of the backstage bar.

"A number of people replied and it was supposed to be an auction but he accepted all the bids and the money was paid into his account," Miss Marlow said.

"Not surprisingly the tickets never materialised at all. The police were contacted because a number of people realised they had been duped."

The police went to Whitnall's work at Enterprise House on the Cheney Manor Industrial Estate and then to his home on Whitworth Road in September last year.

When he was arrested, Whitnall admitted what he had done and told police that he had conned more people than they knew about.

He told officers that he had given a man called Mark Thompson £1,200 for the tickets after meeting him in a pub.

However the tickets never arrived and he never saw Thompson again.

Miss Marlow said that he pocketed £9,062.47 from the people the police knew about.

Whitnall, now of Wath upon Dearne, near Rotherham, South Yorkshire, admitted 25 charges of obtaining money by deception.

Noel Sweeney, defending, said that his client had been involved in drugs since the age of 13 and was taking heroin and crack cocaine at the time of the offences.

He said that he had supportive and caring parents who he had been living with while on bail awaiting sentence.

Jailing him for four months, Judge Tom Longbotham said: "People took you on your word and paid you for tickets you were unable to supply."

Tricked online

MUSIC fan Craig Thompson, of Covingham, was one of Witnall's victims.

He handed over £538 for a pair of VIP tickets and waited in vain for them to arrive in the post.

He said Witnall sent him an email thanking him for the payment and even offered to go to his home to drop off the tickets. But the day the tickets were meant to arrive, the emails suddenly dried up.

He heard nothing and Witnall disappeared.

Craig, 25, a grocery manager, then discovered that other people had been tricked in the same way.

Following complaints from over 13 people, fraud officers from Swindon police launched an investigation.

Jamie Hill