Wedding firm boss left brides in tears with £30,000 scam
A WEDDING company boss who conned dozens of brides and left their dream day in ruins has been jailed.
Sarah Cawthorne, 32, ran a business which pledged to supply wedding accessories for receptions.
A full package from A Little Bit of Bling, including a bespoke bouquet, table centre pieces, chair covers and a chocolate fountain, came to £1,400.
Yet rather than giving women the perfect wedding, Cawthorne pocketed her customers’ deposits without ever providing her services.
Yesterday, a court heard that she had defrauded the brides out of more than £30,000. The mother-of-two used the money to fund a gambling addiction and to jet off to Walt Disney World Florida while her clients were left to pick up the pieces.
Time and time again, Cawthorne, from Dudley, West Midlands, had promised to meet brides on their wedding day but cancelled at the last minute.
She made excuses such as family difficulties or illness and even claimed on one occasion that she’d been in a car accident.
On September 20, 2013, she told a bride that she was unable to attend because of a family emergency in Peterborough.
Yet her bank records showed that on that same day, she had enjoyed a meal out at McDonald’s near Dudley Castle. Mark Jack- son, prosecuting, told Wolverhampton Crown Court: ‘In some cases, the first brides heard about this fraud was when they received a call from their venue, as they were about to walk down the aisle, to be told the venue was bare.’
He added: ‘ Investigations showed that on one day, when a number of bookings had been made in October 2012, she was spending thousands of pounds in Disney World while leaving her customers high and dry.’
Mr Jackson described the scheme orchestrated by Cawthorne over more than a year, as a ‘persistent, systematic and very, very mean fraud’. The court heard that analysis of bank statements showed that Cawthorne frittered away some of the cash on online betting sites.
Yesterday she sobbed as she was jailed for 12 months after pleading guilty to fraudulent trading. Her solicitor, Mukhtar Ubhi, said his client had been suffering from a gambling addiction combined with depression.
He added Cawthorne had never set out to con her clients.
After the case, one of the victims Caren Larkman-Ayre, 31, told the Mail how her wedding venue had been left bare when none of the decorations ordered from Cawthorne arrived. Two years on, she remembers her marriage morning as filled with tears and panic as she tried to hastily find replacements. The sales manager, from West Yorkshire, said: ‘Two hours before my wedding I was frantically ringing around everyone I knew. Every time anyone came to speak to me I just burst into tears. I didn’t know what was going to happen.’
She added: ‘It might not sound much but it’s your wedding day – it’s something you have been planning for years, since you were a child.’
On top of the £484 deposit she lost, Mrs Larkman-Ayre had to spend around £1,000 ordering in hastily arranged replacement decorations for her big day.