Photo: Jaime Hogge
Jeffrey Coolidge/Getty
Fraud
DAVID MALAMED Budding Enterprises
Taylor pleaded guilty and faced up to seven years in prison, a sentence in keeping with the sale of actual cocaine. Judge Simon Bourne-Arton was somewhat perplexed when it
came to passing sentence. He questioned whether he should apply sentencing guidelines assigned to offences involving real drugs. “It’s just not easy to work out what the principles of sen- tencing are in your case,” he said, and delayed his decision several days to consider what to do. Aſter his deliberations, Judge Bourne-Arton ruled that, de-
spite Taylor’s record in relation to actual illegal drugs, he could not sentence him “on the basis that you are a professional and persistent drug dealer.” He jailed Taylor for 31 months: two years for the drug offence,
six months for having violated an existing suspended sentence and one month for having breached a conditional discharge. Although it would seem the Taylor case is highly unusual, in fact the sale of fake illegal drugs is not that uncommon. In Canada, “it is a crime under Section 5 of the Controlled
I
N THE OFTEN BIZARRE ANNALS OF FRAUD CASES, this one seems, at first glance, especially unusual. In October, 27-year-old Jamie Lee Taylor, a resident of Gresham, Middlesbrough, in
northeast England, was sentenced to prison for having sold laundry powder as cocaine (See Scams and Shams, Jan./Feb., p. 53). When police arrested Taylor in September on an unrelated
matter, he had three ziplock bags of the fake drug in his posses- sion. Perhaps assuming it was not a crime to rip off people willing to purchase an illegal substance, he boasted that he’d perpetrated the fraud up to 50 times a day. Taylor explained that he hung around nightspots and sold
the household detergent to partygoers looking for cocaine. He charged £20 for a small amount, garnering, in total, about £100,000 during a period of several months earlier in the year, according to The Sun newspaper. He would have been far wiser to have said nothing. A bit of a career criminal — he had 53 previous offences on
his record, including robbery and drug offences — Taylor dis- covered that what he had done was indeed against the law in the UK. He was charged with offering to supply cocaine to others and
possession of an article for use in fraud — the three bags of white powder. “Essentially, the defendant is purporting to sell drugs in the way that a drug dealer would sell drugs,” the pros- ecutor, Rachel Masters, said. “He’s making a fair bit of money out of it as a result.”
56 | CPA MAGAZINE | MARCH 2017
Substances Act to traffic in illegal drugs or to hold out a sub- stance as a real narcotic,” says Daniel Brown of Daniel Brown Law in Toronto. “Selling baking powder but claiming it is co- caine [for example] can attract the same penalty as trafficking in cocaine.” He notes that in 2004 Larry Lee Aldrich was convicted of
doing just that in Alberta Provincial Court for having sold soap to an undercover RCMP officer on the pretense that it was cocaine. In the US,
criminaldefenselawyer.com posted this question, perhaps from a budding entrepreneur: “I sold a baggie of Aspirins that I said was OxyContin to a guy
at a concert. Aſter the show, I heard that there were undercover officers in the crowd. Could I be busted for selling fake drugs?” The answer: “Yes. States and federal laws make the sale of
fake drugs illegal, and you can even be charged with an attempted drug sale under some laws,” a crime that, in the US, can result in serious jail time. The website added that “taking money from someone under
intentionally false pretences is fraud [because] under the law, an intentionally and materially false statement relied upon by another constitutes fraud.” An obvious attraction to those enticed to sell fake illegal
drugs — other than the considerable profit margins — is the likely reluctance of victims to report the fraud to authorities. That changes, however, when the purchasers turn out to be undercover officers.
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