A 38-year-old man who tried to defraud his mother of £1,000 by pretending he was dead was given a four-month jail sentence, suspended for two years, at the Magistrate’s Court in Derry yesterday.
Wai Hung Lo, with an address at Northland Road in the city and who is formerly from Hong Kong, admitted writing a letter to his mother, using another man’s name, claiming that he, her son, was dead and that he needed £1,000 to pay for his funeral expenses.
He committed the offence last November.
District Judge Barney McElholm was told that Lo needed the £1,000 to pay off his gambling debts, and he came up with the idea of pretending to his mother that he was dead and that £1,000 was needed to pay for the release of his body for burial.
Defence counsel Eoghan Devlin said Lo was in dire straits at the time and he lived in total isolation from his family.
“It would be difficult to see how this enterprise was going to succeed. It was always going to come to light,” he said.