If money can’t actually buy happiness, can it buy affection instead? That seemed to be the question 36-year-old Klare Meyer challenged herself to investigate and take on. Meyer wanted other people to like her. So, she did what she thought was the most sensible and effective way to do so: steal money.
According to Metro, Meyer, who worked as a finance manager for the Ice Organization, managed to siphon almost $200,000 off of the company in an attempt to make others admire her. Meyer’s plan obviously failed.
Ice Organization, which operates a loyalty points website for credit cards called MyIce.com, discovered that Meyer was laundering money and fattening up her salary by transferring money into her bank account illegally.
Meyer, who started the job in June 2010, began funneling money to her annual $40,000 salary. She was taking the cash over a period of five years from February 2011 to 2016. She was spending around $25,000 using the company’s credit and debit cards for leisure activities and hanging out with friends.
Meyer, who’s a mother of one child, pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud and told the Maidstone Crown Court that she spent the laundered money on clothes, meals out, and family holidays. Meyer even had the idea of sending flowers to her friends just for funsies.
Meyer, who got married in April two years ago, admitted to the probation officer that she was straight up addicted to shopping. Meyer was a shopaholic who’d want to shop until she drops.
Judge Philip Statman sentenced Meyer to one year and four months in prison. The judge also noticed an “unusual pattern” in Meyer’s quest to become the next Rebecca Bloomwood.
Meyer was revealed to had been spending more on meals and hang-outs with friends and family rather than taking full advantage of what she stole and hop on the next plane to “holidays in the Seychelles, buying Versace dresses or dining in Michelin-starred restaurants,” an observation that partially reveals something about the judge, too.
Judge Statman posited that Meyer wanted to be surrounded by people who liked her. He added that a “grave breach of trust committed over a substantial period of time.”
Meyer, who as still breastfeeding her son, is currently working on having him be with her inside the prison. If her application gets denied, her husband had to resign from his work and take care of their child full-time.
Meyer managed to find a way to take money off of the company within a year of working for them. She didn’t hesitate to continue on with her plan.
Prosecutor Ian Dear said, “So, for all intents and purposes, Ms. Thorne would be paying out what she thought was a legitimate invoice and these monies would be transferred into the defendant’s account.”
Dear continued, “It was for that reason that it took a considerable time for this fraud to be recognized and it was only by accident that [the owner, Jude] Thorne stumbled upon what was going on.”
Meyer was obviously fired from her job. She took a position as a barmaid at a social club and offered to repay the money by selling her home in Tonbridge, Kent.
