No prison time for fraudster who scammed hundreds with fake plane tickets

A fraudster who scammed hundreds of people by selling them fake airline tickets will spend no time in jail. The man was previously sentenced to 10 months in prison, but got a lower sentence of 240 hours of community service on appeal, RTL Nieuws reports.

In March 2015, the 57-year-old man sold fake tickets to hundreds of people via his website ZonFly. According to the Public Prosecution Service (OM), he raked in over €233,000 in this way.

Customers received a digital ticket that seemed real. Only starting in July of that year, just before their departure, did they start discovering the scam, some during online check-in, others only when they were already at the airport. This left them with the choice of buying much more expensive new tickets, or abandoning their holiday plans altogether. 251 customers filed police reports against the man.

In 2019, the court in Utrecht sentenced the man to 10 months in prison. Another man, to whom the scammer had sold his company on paper just before committing the fraud, had to serve four months in prison.

The scammer appealed. During the appeal, his lawyer argued that there was not enough evidence to convict his client. Because the travel agency was registered to someone else, the fraud could not be attributed to him, the lawyer said.

The Arnhem Court of Appeal did not follow this argument, according to the ruling published this week. The court again convicted the man of fraud, but did lower his sentence to community service.

"For a fraud case as large as the one at issue here (...), an unconditional prison sentence – as imposed by the court – is in principle appropriate," the Court of Appeal said. But because 6.5 years have passed since the previous ruling, and the fraudster “has since got his life back on track,” a prison sentence is no longer reasonable, the court said. "If the defendant were to go to prison now, it would have disproportionately large negative consequences for him."