David Love

A WOMAN who conned a childless couple into believing she was carrying their baby has been jailed for two years.

A sheriff described 25-year-old Samantha Brown’s crime as “callous, calculated and cynical”.

She led Benita and Mark Cutter, of Humberside, to believe she was pregnant with their longed-for baby but then told them that she had lost the child after being involved in a car crash. 
Brown, who had never been pregnant, even sent the Cutters a picture which was said to show the dead child in a bid to convince them of her lies. 

She was paid more than £8,000 in faked expenses by the couple, who she met after responding to an advert they placed online. 

She will serve the prison term at the conclusion of a three-year sentence imposed by the same sheriff in October last year after Brown admitted shooting a neighbour in the face at point blank range with an air rifle in a row over seagulls.

She will also be on supervised release for a further year.

At Inverness Sheriff Court, Sheriff Margaret Neilson said: “What makes this fraud particularly despicable is the callous, calculated and cynical manner in which it was carried out over a 10-month period.”

Brown, of Mansfield Estate, Tain, earlier admitted the surrogacy fraud, inducing the Cutters to pay her a total of £8,307 in fake expenses over a 10-month period between June 25, 2013 and April 20, 2014.

Fiscal Roderick Urquhart told the court the Cutters were “desperate for a child and perhaps consequently were a little gullible”.

They travelled to her home in Tain and Mr Cutter provided daily semen samples for Brown, who was in a lesbian relationship at the time, to use for artificial insemination. 

Mr Urquhart said that scans were sent to the Cutters with reports of antenatal classes and demands for fake lost wages, maternity clothes and trips to midwife classes.

The alarm was raised after Mr and Mrs Cutter received a text message and photo stating that Brown had been in a car crash. 

Mr Urquhart said: “The Cutters thought that the child in the 
photograph looked asleep, rather than dead, and the material in which it was wrapped did not look like hospital issue. Alarm bells rang and they contacted the hospital Brown was supposed to be in, to learn that they had no record of her. 

“It would appear that the financial loss incurred by the Cutters paled almost into insignificance compared with the heartbreak, anguish and despair they suffered when they realised not only that they were not to become parents, but that they had been the victims of a calculated and callous fraud.” 

Charges against Brown’s former co-accused 44-year-old Karen Galashan were dropped by the Crown and the court heard that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute her.

Defence agent Alison Foggo told the court that her client accepted that it was a “callous crime and repugnant”.

Since her first appearance in court, Ms Foggo said Brown had been “bullied, harassed and harangued” in HMP Grampian.