A FRAUDSTER has been convicted of duping investors out of £5million by promising impossible returns on property deals in Cyprus at a time when she was based in North Yorkshire.

Sascha Morris, 46, was found guilty by a jury at Leeds Crown Court on one charge of fraudulent trading and two of fraud involving the information she gave to her investors.

The court heard some had lost hundreds of thousands of pounds as a result of trusting Morris, including one woman from Easingwold who had lost over £250,000.

There were two separate cases against Morris. The first involved around 40 individual investors who went to Morris for financial advice between 2004 to 2007 through her business Morris and Hale Ltd, then operating in Harrogate.

They were encouraged through her acting as a property broker to invest in off-plan properties in Cyprus by either buying to let or as she termed “flipping” the properties by selling them on before completion when they had to be fully paid for.

Nadim Bashir, prosecuting, said she wrongly gave investors the impression well-known holiday companies would buy or rent the properties and investors either lost their deposit or found themselves having to pay for the full property when they had not expected to do so. Individual investors had lost over £3m.

In a separate fraud Morris sourced more than £2.2million from two groups of investors to a company she claimed would finance property developments. Each group was unaware that the other was involved and would be entitled to half of the value. When the schemes either failed or did not make the money expected, they too lost out.

York Press:

Morris denied any misrepresentation or withholding facts from the investors but her account was rejected following the investigation by North Yorkshire Police’s major fraud team.

Morris, a mother of two, more recently from Eastbourne, will be sentenced next month after her counsel asked for time for her to explain her situation to her two young daughters.