A woman’s desire to live beyond her means and a crazy bag obsession landed her in prison for two and a half years, the Washington Post reports.
41-year-old Praepitcha Smatsorabudh made a business out of buying designer bags from luxury stores just to return their knockoffs and pocket the money.
Smatsorabudh, who was also a preschool teacher, hit up stores like Neiman Marcus and T.J. Maxx buying expensive name brand bags like Gucci, Fendi, and Burberry. She would then purchase bogus handbags from China and Hong Kong that apparently looked real enough to return them as the real ones she previously bought.
“The best fake bag I’ve ever seen! Can you send me more … from this factory. They make bag IMPaCABLE!!!!” [sic],” Smatsorabudh wrote in a September 2014 email to a bogus-handbag supplier via the NY Post.
The woman would also falsify receipts so that the fake bags could match…. yep Joanne the Scammer has nothing on her!
The 41-year-old would then sell the real bags on eBay and on Instagram under the name “richgirlcollection.” Unfortunately for her, Smatsorabodh’s luck ran out when an undercover Homeland Security agent bought a $2,575 Celine bag from her off of eBay. Further investigation also showed that she doctored the receipt enough to return a Fendi bag in its place and pocketed a $2,199.99 refund.
“I think what you did was ingenious,” Judge Gerald Bruce Lee said, according to the Washington Post.
“It’s just stealing, but the internet has given us so many more ways to steal. … I thought I’d seen everything.”
The U.S. Department of Justice says she has scammed over 60 stores in 12 states and pocketed more than $400k with her crime. It was even reported that she had became T.J. Maxx’s top online customer in the world at one point.
Well her obsession with designer bags landed her behind bars for 33 months on top of three years supervised release and a hefty $403,250.81 restitution bill. She is also facing deportation back to Thailand.
“What I did was so wrong,” she said. “I deserve to be in jail.”
This isn’t the con artist’s first stint with the law either. Back in March, her Arlington home was raided by the Feds and they recorded finding a total of 572 authentic and fake bags. The raid had forced her to plead guilty to wire fraud a few months later.
Well, Smatsorabudh’s attorney Nina Ginsberg has a different spin on why her client was so obsessed.
“This whole collecting of these handbags, returning of these handbags — it became a substitute for human connection, which I think is profoundly sad,” Ginsberg said in court. Smatsorabudh, who grew up in Thailand, Ginsberg said, was physically and emotionally abused by her parents, who also fought regularly and openly cheated on each other. “I think it was brought on by . . . extreme bouts of loneliness and isolation.”
Well ironically Smatsorabudh’s last Instagram post was:
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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/compulsion-to-have-expensive-handbags-lands-woman-in-prison/2016/12/21/3b9158dc-c7a3-11e6-85b5-76616a33048d_story.html?utm_term=.97349f643e58
http://nypost.com/2016/12/28/con-artist-raked-in-1m-returning-designer-bag-knockoffs/
