Bogus Heiress Jailed For Fraud

Fri, 04 July 2008 Courtesy of: Guardian Unlimited

To her many friends and supporters, Elda Beguinua was the world's wealthiest heiress who, they believed, would become history's biggest philanthropist. But to the judge that put her in jail yesterday, she was "a fraudster of the first order".

The "contessa" spun a fairytale story about a treasure so vast that its dollar value, she claimed, could only be described as "300 followed by 41 zeros".

Beguinua, 63, was yesterday jailed for five years at Southwark crown court for fraudulently obtaining the savings of "vulnerable victims". She was previously imprisoned for fraud 11 years ago.

Beguinua moved to Britain from the Philippines 20 years ago, and began inventing various outlandish and fictional identities for herself as she conned money out of people to fund nonexistent humanitarian projects.

She told some she was descended from Spanish aristocracy, to others she claimed to be related to both the Hapsburg and Bourbon royal dynasties. She said the fortune that awaited her included 2m tonnes of gold stashed in "unmarked caves" in the far east, where it was kept safe by retired "generals and colonels".

She even handed the court a video of people carrying gold ingots through the jungle. Her retinue of believers were also assured that more wealth was in 57 bank accounts in 33 countries.

As Jenny Goldring, prosecuting, put it: "She doesn't do things by halves. She is a crook who likes to play it big, and the bigger the lie the better."

The court heard that Beguinua gained her victims' trust by telling them about her incredible inheritance. She told them she planned to invest the money in grandiose charity schemes - but as it was temporarily inaccessible, she asked them to loan her money in the interim. Although she always promised to repay their loans "many times over", they never saw a penny back.

Yet many of those whose money Beguinua took told the court they did not believe she had meant them ill will. Financial consultant Richard Bedard, who had handed her £127,000 to pay for "legal things", insisted he still believed in her. He claimed a CIA agent had assured him the money really existed.

The judge criticised Beguinua for boasting about her criminality. Jeremy McMullen QC said that when Beguinua was confronted about her previous conviction by a would-be victim - she spent two years in jail in the late 90s for trying to use 80,000-tonnes of nonexistent gold to fraudulently obtain a £16trn windfall - she had remarked she wanted to be "the number one fraudster in the Guinness Book of Records".

Yesterday Beguinua, in reality a mother of two who lived in a semi-detached
house in Dulwich, south-east London, was convicted of seven counts of deception, one attempted deception and two of removing criminal property from Britain.