A woman who stole more than £100,000 from a Sussex business while in charge of the company’s payroll has been jailed for three years. Lynn Boakes of Sea Lane in Pagham was hired as a bookkeeper at a steel company in Birdham in April 2013. Police said towards the end of 2016 the 47-year-old started to abuse the trust she had built by taking regular sick days, despite posts on social media showing her shopping or being abroad on holiday. Concerned, the director of the company searched for the payroll documents for the previous few years and discovered Boakes had overpaid herself by a total of £13,462 between October 2014 and April 2017. Officers said she had used her inflated payslips to purchase a car on finance. They also found Boakes had diverted £103,450.26 worth of her employer’s funds into her personal bank account, having disguised the funds using a fake company name. Boakes was immediately suspended from the company, the director informed Sussex Police who seized her work computer. On the device, a job application falsely stating her husband – 54-year-old David Boakes – had worked for the steel company for two years. It had been signed by a fake employee ‘Janet Young’ – Boakes’ actual middle and maiden names –, according to police Lynn has been sentenced to three years in prison following guilty pleas to three counts of fraud. While her husband has been handed a two-year conditional discharge after pleading guilty to fraud by representation.
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