Fraud and Internships: A Court Case in Meissen

Meissen. A beefy clerk rolls a trolley full of files into the courtroom. Two others lead the accused in handcuffs. The woman from Diera-Zehren is accused of multiple fraud. She takes a seat in the dock between her defense attorney and his young intern. The latter is between school and university and looks over the shoulders of the lawyer for two weeks before she decides on a course of study. She vacillates between law and biology, she says. The three court employees sit down in the first row and judge Pospischil opens the hearing.

The indictment is long, as is often the case with fraud cases. The public prosecutor read out almost 60 charges in the first 20 minutes of the hearing. The woman is said to have enriched herself in various ways: sometimes she ordered items from mail order companies under false names and addresses, sometimes she signed cell phone contracts just to reap the rewards. The judge attested to her creativity in finding a name. Why would she have bothered? To circumvent extradition bans is the answer.

The value of the goods is considerable: she had ordered handicraft supplies worth around 6,400 euros from a single supplier in several orders and with different names. Sewing kits and fabrics over 3,200 euros at another. The defendant states that she would like to sew and design fashion professionally, but has not yet managed to do so.

Hours of negotiation

She ordered a playhouse for almost 5,000 euros and a trampoline for 500 euros for her daughter (and did not pay for it), rented a mini excavator and a vibrating plate without intending to pay to clear construction debris in the garden that her landlord would not have taken care of. In addition, the erotic items for around 140 euros almost seem like an afterthought. According to the public prosecutor, the total value of the goods that the accused is said to have ordered together is around 21,000 euros. The defendant fully admits the allegations.

The judge is perplexed how it could come to this. You have to see that this can’t end well. Once you are entangled, the accused replies, you no longer see it so objectively. When asked why, she explains that her family had been deprived of their household several times. They had previously lived in Grossenhain, where one day the landlord simply exchanged the lock for them.

The prosecutor and the defense attorney disagree vehemently about the appropriate sentence. A long legal discussion follows, the trial continues. After almost six hours, the verdict: two years without probation. Nobody knows what will happen after that. However, the defendant leaves the courtroom the way she entered: in handcuffs.