Samantha Cookes, the serial fraudster who lived in Ireland for a decade under multiple aliases while working for families as a live-in au pair, has been convicted of theft and jailed for a further three-month period.
Cookes (36) was brought before the courts in Killarney, Co Kerry, on Tuesday morning to face charges over the theft of a sofa and two armchairs valued at over €5,000 from a property she was renting in Kenmare. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a further three months.
Her latest conviction comes weeks after The Irish Times reported she was under Garda investigation after new allegations were made about her time in Co Kerry. Cookes is currently serving a prison sentence for a €60,000 social welfare fraud and was taken from Limerick Prison to court on Tuesday.
Originally from Gloucester, Cookes lived in Co Kerry, in Cahersiveen and Kenmare, for three years to the end of 2022. She also spent time there last year, when she was arrested in Tralee as part of the social welfare inquiry.
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While she was there she was selling sensory toys for children with special needs via a website. While she claimed online she was making the toys with a 3D printer, no toys were ever delivered to people who ordered and paid sums online. Furniture also went missing from a house she was renting in Kenmare, where she sublet the property via Airbnb without permission.
While in Kerry, she also posed as a terminally ill writer, Carrie Jade Williams, and won awards for some of her writing, including pieces based on her fake assumed identity of a writer dying from Huntington’s disease. She secured Arts Council grants, in 2021 and 2022, totalling €36,250. Cookes is not terminally ill.
Last July she was arrested outside a post office in Tralee for social welfare fraud of €60,334.35 after securing payments based on her claimed, though faked, medical condition. She was sentenced to three years last month and has been in prison since her arrest last summer.
In May 2019 she was convicted in the courts in Cork on four fraud and theft charges, with a 14-week suspended sentence imposed. Three charges related to a bogus trip to Lapland she claimed to be organising while living in south Co Dublin in 2016, and which she collected deposits for before she disappeared.
The other charge related to an assessment she carried out on a child in Cork in 2017, for which she was paid €840, while pretending to be a child psychologist.
In 2011, Ms Cookes was convicted of fraud in Britain after taking money from a couple who wanted to enter into a surrogacy arrangement with her. After taking an initial £1,200 from them, she discontinued contact with them. A nine-month sentence was fully suspended.
