A man who posed as an NHS worker to scam a 92-year-old woman into paying £140 for a fake Covid-19 vaccine has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison.
Kathleen Martin, now 93, said she hoped her “harrowing” experience did not deter others from taking up the jab.
On 30 December, just weeks into the UK’s vaccination rollout, David Chambers, 33, went to Martin’s home in Surbiton, south-west London, wearing a fake lanyard and pretending to be an NHS employee. He pretended to vaccinate Martin by pressing a “dart-like implement” on to the back of her wrist, but did not inject anything or break the skin.
He then demanded she pay him £140, claiming it would be refunded by the NHS, before returning days later on 4 January to ask for another £100, which she refused to pay.
The 33-year-old was sentenced at Kingston crown court on Friday after pleading guilty to two counts of fraud by false representation and battery at a previous hearing.
The conman, who had a history of preying on elderly people in their homes, was also handed a seven-year criminal behaviour order. Chambers had previously been jailed for 18 months for burgling an elderly woman after pretending he was visiting to check her heating appliances, and had also been given a suspended sentence for defrauding two elderly people by claiming he had been locked out of his home and needed to borrow money for a locksmith.
Judge Hannah Kinch said Chambers took “full advantage” of the vaccination rollout to target an elderly person at home. She said: “I have no doubt your actions caused significant anxiety and distress to other elderly people at that time, worried they might too fall victim to that scam.
“Your actions were cruelly calculated to trick the victim into thinking she had been properly vaccinated so as to be able to obtain payment from her.”
Scammers have seized on the pandemic and vaccine rollout to target people, with a rise in cybercrime also recorded as fraudsters use NHS-themed email and text message to harvest people’s personal information.
Prosecutor William Davis argued that Chambers’s scam, which was carried out as Covid-19 cases were surging in the UK, “risked undermining confidence in the vaccine rollout” which had begun just weeks before.
In a statement, Martin said that she had “never been subject to such a deceitful and horrific crime” and described the experience as “harrowing”. She added: “It has been a difficult few months coming to terms with the reality that someone could go to such lengths to defraud a person.”
