In a population of over 50 million there will always be bad apples, but that term doesn’t come close to describing a certain Leone Steyn.

After pleading guilty to fraud, the 23-year-old is appearing in the Roodepoort Magistrate’s Court for her sentencing.

It’s not just your usual fraud case though, because Steyn showed a real dark side during her criminal activities.

The details from IOL:

Ruthless and inherently unscrupulous. Manipulative. Struggles to tell right from wrong. In desperate need of psychological evaluation.

These were some of the ways Leone Steyn was described…

When she was 17 years old, Steyn laid the groundwork for a more than three year long scam that ultimately netted her R592 000 in cash and goods that she defrauded from churches and an online counselling service.

Using the counselling service, MobieG, Steyn created more than 50 profiles of fictitious children that she claimed had been rescued from a satanic porn ring, and had the service solicit donations from churches across the West Rand.

Sometimes pretending to kill her characters off through suicide to garner sympathy, Steyn also got the company to donate thousands upon thousands to the fake safehouse where the children were supposedly being kept.

Steyn started using crack cocaine at the age of 17, which may explain why she needed such vast sums of money.

Her defence is arguing that due to her ‘remorsefulness, youthfulness and her status as a first time offender’ she should be spared any jail time, asking instead for either a suspended sentence or house arrest.

The prosecution, not surprisingly, aren’t all that keen to play ball:

…the extent of the damage Steyn caused became readily apparent in [director of MobieG Stephnie] Crouse’s victim impact statement, read into the record by prosecutor Danette van Schalkwyk.

Crouse said that she was “broken” when she found out the children she had spent years trying to save had been a hoax. Each of the four times Steyn convinced counsellors that a child had committed suicide, they felt the “worst trauma a facilitator can experience”.

Crouse explained that as the story of the safehouse spread, parents desperate for children had offered to adopt them.

“To play with the feelings of people hoping for a child is inhumanly cruel,” she said.

MobieG had also gone into severe financial hardships after their reputation was ruined by Steyn’s fraud.

To concoct such a story at the tender age of 17 is unbelievable, and whilst I’m no psychologist I’d hasten a guess that it points to some serious problems.

The case has been postponed until Monday.

[source:iol]

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