A 31-year-old woman abused the trust of her friends and a friend's parents, using them to fund a HK$700,000 spending spree, a judge said as he sent her to jail yesterday. Yeung Mei-mei had pleaded guilty in the District Court to 24 charges of fraud and obtaining property by deception. Between March and May 2008, she habitually spent nights at the Landmark Mandarin Oriental, tipping generously, and bought gift vouchers at Lane Crawford and clothes from a boutique. Deputy District Judge Josiah Lam Wai-kuen jailed her for 1? years, taking off six months because her psychological problems meant she had 'diminished culpability'. Yeung has suffered from impulse control disorder since the late 1990s. In a mitigation letter to the judge yesterday, Yeung said that her desire for expensive possessions was 'based on a mental attitude that wanted more'. Yeung was charged with 11 counts of fraud and 13 counts of obtaining property by deception totalling HK$728,865. The court heard earlier that Yeung had made friends with Ng Tsz-yi, who worked at a salon in Central that she regularly patronised. Ng later introduced her parents and her boyfriend, Tsang Kin-on, to Yeung. They all became victims of her scams. On one occasion, Yeung told Ng that she would like to take her on a business trip, but needed money to apply for the visa. Ng handed over HK$30,000. She had paid nearly HK$200,000 in restitution, including HK$150,000 to Ng, the court heard. But she had no ability to pay the rest of her debts. Yeung, unemployed, was living with her parents, helping at her sister's boutique and tutoring her sister's child before she was jailed. Prosecutor Peggy Leung Po-kei said that after Yeung became friends with Ng and Tsang, she started to make up different excuses to ask for money. Ng's parents gave credit cards to Yeung, who used them to settle bills at the Landmark Mandarin Oriental and to buy Lane Crawford gift vouchers and clothes from a boutique. Yeung first discovered she had difficulty controlling herself when shopping when she went to the United States to attend the University of California in Los Angeles in 1998. In her second year there, Yeung got into debt because she kept buying luxury items to please her boyfriend. She had arrived from Fujian in 1988 and studied at the prestigious Belilios Public School before attending university in the US.
