The court decided to assess dozens of frauds as a whole. The convicted person has a previous record of similar crimes.
The man in his forties considered most of his actions mild. However, the West Uusimaa district court decided to evaluate them as a whole. Henri Kärkkäinen
The district court of Länsi-Uusimaa has sentenced a man who committed online fraud to his factories to one year’s unconditional prison sentence. The man born in 1980 was blamed for no less than 73 frauds, all but one of which were related to products sold online.
The man had sold camping equipment, high school books, clothes, baseball equipment, tools and also furniture online. Due to the large number of acts, the total damage of the crimes was more than 10,000 euros. He had not returned the money to most of them.
Scams had been committed at least on Facebook’s Marketplace and Tori.fi. Lohja has been marked as the crime scene. The acts were committed between July 2, 2020 and March 30, 2022, i.e. the time of committing was one year and nine months.
The whole thing was resolved
The accused admitted to all the crimes, but considered that he was guilty of minor fraud in most of them. In those acts, the criminal benefit had remained below 300 euros, i.e. little. In only seven cases of fraud, the victim had paid the online fraudster more than 300 euros.
In the district court, the prosecutor demanded that the man in his forties be sentenced to unconditional imprisonment on the grounds of increasing the punishment. After evaluating the case as a whole, the district court accepted the grounds for aggravation.
The Supreme Court has previously held in its preliminary ruling in 2018 that in a similar series of online frauds, it was justified to assess the matter as a whole rather than through individual acts.
Absolute punishment
The convicted person has a previous record of similar frauds. The man has previously been sentenced in 2016 to a suspended prison sentence of more than a year for 124 counts of fraud, in 2019 to a suspended prison sentence of a couple of months for two counts of fraud, and in 2021 to a suspended prison sentence of seven months for 24 counts of fraud.
The district court considered that the repetition of similar deliberate and planned acts within a short period of time shows the perpetrator’s disregard for the prohibitions and orders of the law.
The district court of Länsi-Uusimaa sentenced a man in his forties to one year of unconditional imprisonment for several fraud crimes. The judgment is not binding.