The bizarre story one girl used to explain theft of £5,200

Carys Owens, a 22-year-old from Torpoint in Devon, stole £5,200 from her landlord, and spent it on a luxury holiday to Antigua. When she was caught by police, she concocted a strange tale to convince them she had a good reason for taking the cash.

The Mirror reported that her landlord had kept the cash in her kitchen - hidden behind a large container of olive oil. After she made dinner for her friends one evening, they spotted the money. She told them it had been a gift from her boyfriend, and took them out for expensive drinks.

She then caught a bus to London, and a plane to Antigua. By the time her landlord realised that the money was gone, she was no longer in the country.

While she was overseas, she filled her Facebook page with pictures of her enjoying her landlord's cash, and she didn't return until she was deported for stealing a mobile phone. Police spoke to her when she arrived back in the UK in September 2013, but she evaded justice by escaping to Antigua, and then on to Croydon.
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According to the Daily Mail, she was eventually caught, and taken to court, where she admitted she had taken the money. However, in mitigation, her lawyer came up with an unexpected tale. She claimed that the money was part of a £11,000 payment from her landlord - as part of a deal in which she was supposed to marry his Iraqi cousin - in order to get him into the country.

The reason she admitted it was theft was because she said she never intended to go through with the marriage.

Her landlord denied the accusation, and Owens was ordered to repay the victim £5,200, do 100 hours unpaid work and pay a £100 victim surcharge.

Facebook

It would seem odd that a woman who didn't want to be caught would flaunt the holiday she bought with the stolen cash on Facebook. However, she's not the first to do something like this.

In September last year an Ohio man was arrested for bank robbery. Police had been stumped, until they received a tip off to check the man's Facebook account, where they found pictures of him posing with bundles of cash.

And over this side of the pond, in 2014, two men from Salford were jailed after posting pictures on Facebook bragging about the luxury cars they had stolen. Police were able to download all the evidence they needed to secure a conviction.