Online bingo player stole to fund compulsion to gamble

Jacqueline Balaam, a 41-year-old financial officer at Pembroke College in the University of Cambridge who was arrested last year on fraud charges, paid the price for her wrongdoing this week when she was sentenced to two and a half years in jail.

Balaam, reportedly a compulsive online bingo gambler, was convicted in the Cambridge Crown Court after pleading guilty to two counts of fraud by abuse of position and one count of false accounting.

The court heard evidence that she used a sophisticated and complex method of falsifying invoices to obtain a total of £285,986.18 between June 2012 and January 2014, and defrauded the Girton Social Club, where she worked as treasurer, of £3,198.

In total it was estimated she made and lost more than £6 million during her online gambling addiction, the Metro daily newspaper reports.