Case Study 2: Is Your Theft Relative?

Initial Contact

Our first contact with our client was via email. She asked a number of questions about the company, as well as the details of the examiner’s qualifications and experience, who would potentially conduct a test if she decided to go ahead. Those details were quickly supplied, and a few days later she rang to make an appointment.

Background

The client is in her 70s and has been self-isolating from the start of the recent pandemic.

She explained that 15 years earlier, her own daughter had gone through a particularly nasty divorce, fuelled on both sides by a long history of drug abuse.

After the divorce, the daughter, who at the time lived in Liverpool, initially cared for her own daughter by herself. After some months struggling with both debt and continued substance misuse, both mother and daughter moved to live with the client in the hope of a new start.

Initially, things went well with the new family unit. Our client had her daughter back under her roof, where she could help and support her, the bonus being that she also had her lovely granddaughter, whom she could help nurture.

Challenge

Sadly, the daughter soon began to slip into her old ways, making contact with her old social circle and resuming her drug addiction. Within 12 months of moving from Liverpool to Manchester, the daughter sadly died of an overdose, leaving the granddaughter in the full-time care of our client.

Our client said that having the full-time responsibility for her granddaughter no doubt helped her through the trauma of losing her own daughter. She focused all her attention on the little girl and watched her blossom both academically and as a person.

Teenage years brought on a whole new challenge with the granddaughter, who began to hang around with the wrong crowd. Our client was constantly worried that her granddaughter might follow in her mother’s drug-abusing footsteps. These worries seemed found lessen when the granddaughter was accepted into the University of Manchester and appeared committed to a bright future.

The Incident

When the University closed during the pandemic lockdown, the granddaughter returned to her grandmother’s home in Manchester. She very quickly took over responsibility for all the household shopping duties, because she was a student, she relied on her grandmother to pay.

To facilitate this, the grandmother handed over her debit card and her PIN number whenever the granddaughter went shopping. Our client often would tell her granddaughter to take out small amounts of cash to use as her own pocket money.

The client was not a wealthy woman, but she did have savings, all held in her current account. Her call to us was prompted after a Bank Statement arrived at her home showing over £2000 had been taken in the sums of £400 a time, all in the period of time the granddaughter had been in possession of the bank card.

She has questioned the granddaughter, and her biggest fear was that the money was being used for drugs, but all she received were denials. They reached an agreement that the matter would be resolved by a polygraph test.

Process and Outcome

The granddaughter attended our Manchester office, where a test was conducted, which revealed deception, supporting the suspicion that the girl had stolen from her grandmother. When the client was informed, she told us that on returning home from the test, the girl had burst into tears and admitted taking the money for her and her friends to buy cocaine.

Resolution

To the client’s eternal credit, she stated that she would be supporting her granddaughter through rehab, and as far as she was concerned, the matter was now closed.