A man from Wollongong, New South Wales in Australia has been sentenced to 350 hours of community service after orchestrating a fake kidnapping on New Year’s Eve, reports the NY Post.
Instead of spending the evening with his girlfriend, he wanted to be with his sex worker mistress. The hoax resulted in approximately 200 wasted police hours, costing taxpayers over $25,000. Iera left his home under the pretense of meeting his financial advisor but later sent a text message to his partner claiming he had been kidnapped.
The mistress told her,
“Thank you for sending Paul to me, now payback is a b****, bye-bye. But I’m going to be fare, OK, we will keep him with us until the morning when he gives us his bike,”
the text message read.
“We call it square, no one’s touching him, my word I’ll give you, OK hun.”
Iera’s girlfriend contacted the police due to safety concerns. The authorities reviewed surveillance footage and spoke with witnesses, as reported by the Daily Mail. The following day, Iera contacted his father and claimed to have been kidnapped but was now back in Wollongong. He stated that his captors were dropping him off near his car.
In response, the police conducted a
“high-risk”
vehicle stop on Iera’s van, suspecting he was being held hostage. However, they found only Iera inside. He told the police that
“unknown Middle Eastern males”
hired by his mistress had abducted him to force him to surrender his motorcycle. However, the story unraveled when security footage showed that Iera had been with a sex worker on the night in question. Additional footage revealed that Iera and his lover got into her vehicle shortly after he called his father. The woman then returned home alone.
Iera was also ordered to pay $16,000 (or about $10,266 US) to the New South Wales police.
#Clique, what are your thoughts?
