How UK's worst EVER conwoman posed as a witch doctor, stole £3m from the sick & encouraged an unnecessary abortion
DEEP in the South American jungle, a shaman in ceremonial robes whispered incantations, a bundle of smoking herbs in one hand and a wad of cash in the other.
The money had been sent from the UK by a psychic and healer called Juliette D'Souza, with instructions to pin it to a sacred tree as an offering to the forest spirits.
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'Take this sacrifice,' he chanted. 'And protect those who offer it.'
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in London's leafy suburb of Hampstead, elderly widow Sylvia Eaves waited anxiously for news that the £226,000 she'd given D'Souza in order to save the life of her younger sister – who was seriously ill with Crohn's disease – had worked its magic in the spirit realm.
'Take this sacrifice'
The truth is, this mystical 'ceremony' never happened.
There was no sacred tree or forest spirits, and the shaman was an invention by con artist D'Souza, who used the money she extorted from vulnerable people to pay for designer handbags, jewellery and luxury London apartments.
Believed to be the most successful female fraudster in British legal history, D'Souza, now 70 – who was born in Guyana and purported to have the ability to summon cures for cancer, endow couples with fertility and guard against injury and death – was jailed for 10 years in 2014.
Her crime spree – which left a trail of financial and emotional destruction spanning at least 16 years – is chronicled in the podcast Filthy Ritual, hosted by Hannah Maguire and Suruthi Bala.
'Cure cancer and beat death'
'You think that only a specific type of person can be vulnerable or victimised, but this story showed that's wrong,' Suruthi tells Fabulous.
'Juliette D'Souza played a long game. She built a wall of deception and coercion brick by brick.
'It was a fascinating human story of people who were in such a desperate position, terrified for their lives or of losing a loved one.
'It showed how people are willing to suspend belief in the hope that somebody can make that pain go away.'
The roll call of devastation D'Souza wreaked is breathtaking.
Hannah explains: 'Along with Sylvia, her other victims included a solicitor who had terminal leukaemia. He spent £7,000 on the false promise of a cure.
"A couple who had a son with Down's syndrome gave £42,000 after D'Souza promised she could help with his behavioural problems, and a photographer was scammed out of £45,000 trying to save the life of his sick mother, before declaring bankruptcy.
'Another couple handed over £359,000 – with the wife paying to keep herself from going blind, while the husband had been convinced by D'Souza that his wife was going to kill him and he needed 'protection'.
'An actress was diagnosed by D'Souza with a cycle of illnesses, including pancreatic cancer, a brain tumour and heart disease. She lost her home and £730,000.'
D'Souza told a pregnant client her baby was going to have deformities and that she should abort it
The podcast traces D'Souza's scamming spree back to 1993, when she first met father-of-two and osteopath Keith Bender, who lived in Hampstead with his actress wife Kate.
D'Souza became Keith's client while mired in financial and marital problems, and she'd eventually infiltrate his life completely.
When Keith was diagnosed with depression, he confided in D'Souza, and when the bank threatened to repossess his house, she claimed she was a lawyer – it's unknown if that was true or not – and helped him with the paperwork.
She even loaned him money to stop the repossession.
Keith later recalled: 'I had terrible problems in my personal life. I was very depressed.
'Juliette stepped in to save me. She even represented me in my divorce proceedings, which I was hugely grateful for.
'I had no reason to doubt her or not to introduce her to friends. She was completely plausible – very charming, spirited and well-turned-out.'
After three years of 'friendship', she revealed she was a healer, a shaman and a psychic.
Keith, who had an interest in alternative therapies, believed her and even accompanied her on a trip to Suriname – a tiny country that borders Guyana – in 1996, where he underwent a healing ceremony in a 'magic' pond.
Back in London, D'Souza told him her 'psychic antennae' saw that Keith was going to develop cancer in his lower abdomen – but she could stop it if he followed her exact instructions and made cash 'sacrifices'.
These would be flown to a shaman in Suriname, who would then hang them on a sacred tree.
The money would show the forest spirits that Keith was serious about making a pact for their help, and once the problem had been dealt with, the money would be returned to him.
'When you are already down because you've lost everything you have worked for, you can't even think straight,' he explained.
With Keith well and truly wrapped around D'Souza's finger, she then persuaded him to start recommending her mystic services to some of his own clients.
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One of these clients was Sylvia, who then started paying 'sacrifices' to help her unwell sister, with the amounts escalating as time went on.
'D'Souza told her 'clients' she had treated Princess Diana, Simon Cowell, the Duke of York and Robert Redford, and that she had saved John Cleese's daughter from cancer.
"She used the money to rent four flats in a renovated house, where she lived in just one, and filled others with hoarded luxury goods and a pet monkey named Joey,' says Hannah.
'Manipulating people'
She appeared to enjoy manipulating people.
Hannah adds: 'There was one young woman, a lawyer who worked in the City, who'd been trying for years to get pregnant.
'D'Souza persuaded her to offer sacrifices to the spirits – and the woman fell pregnant.
'D'Souza then told her the baby was going to have serious deformities and that she should abort the baby she'd tried so long to have. And she did.
'She was intelligent and educated and longed for this child. But on a word from Juliette D'Souza, she terminated the pregnancy.
'That one really stood out to us, because that wasn't for money. That was D'Souza enjoying the control and the power.'
Meanwhile, Keith was fully under her spell and became her errand boy.
He collected 'sacrifices' for her and she even persuaded him to put his name on the leases for her flats. He paid the £7,500-a-month rent with money she gave him.
But D'Souza's web of lies began to unravel in 2007. She'd gone to Suriname at the end of the previous year, telling Keith she'd be back by the end of December and leaving him to feed her pet monkey.
'She stayed away for much longer than she'd told Keith she would, and when she failed to return he became concerned, particularly when the landlord of the flats started to chase him for the rent.
'Eventually, with £24,000 owing, Keith and the landlord ventured into D'Souza's lair and discovered the designer goods, plus voodoo dolls and a freezer of rotten meat,' says Hannah.
Web of lies
'D'Souza told Keith he was forbidden from calling her home in Suriname, but eventually he felt he had to.
'When he called, she told him a sacrifice was due for collection and he should use that to pay the rent.
'For Keith – who believed wholeheartedly the money was sacred and was always sent to the magic tree – the penny finally dropped.'
It later transpired that during the time she'd dropped off the radar, D'Souza had been in pre-trial detention in Suriname for the extortion of a wealthy socialite.
She was convicted and sentenced to eight months in jail, but had already served most of the sentence on remand. By the time Keith called her, she had been released.
Keith told her other victims what he'd discovered and they went to the police, who said there was nothing they could do, as they'd all willingly given the money.
In desperation, they went to the press, and after an investigation, The Sunday Times published an expose in 2008, tracking D'Souza down in Suriname, where she was living with her partner, a high-ranking police officer. She gave no comment.
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In 2009, D'Souza returned to Hampstead and reconnected with Sylvia, convincing her the newspaper story had been fake and she was a genuine shaman.
Sylvia's close friend Maria – who is in her late 60s – told the podcast how she had watched her deteriorate physically and emotionally, but couldn't quite put her finger on why.
'Things began to change in her life. There was no food in her fridge. She wasn't buying clothes. Everything was going awry. It was getting worse and worse,' said Maria, a former nurse from north London.
Sylvia's sister had died the previous year, leaving her an inheritance of several hundred thousand pounds.
Despite this, Maria suspected her friend's problems were financial, because she had voiced concerns about paying for work on her flat.
'It almost ended our friendship,' said Maria. 'I couldn't reach her. I'd done everything for her and still she seemed angry with me.'
It was only when Sylvia confided in another friend that she'd, once again, been sending money to D'Souza that Maria realised what had been going on.
What began as a £3,000 payment in return for herbs to help cure a stomach ailment had escalated to a total of almost £250,000.
'One minute my heart was breaking for her, the next I was angry with her, thinking how can she be so stupid,' Maria said.
Sylvia had been duped into believing her money was being returned, but was held in customs and she would have to pay even more to have it released. D'Souza posed as a customs officer to convince the pensioner of this via a phone call.
A group of Sylvia's friends went to the police once more, and when Maria explained D'Souza had been impersonating a customs officer, they agreed to investigate.
Maria recalls on the podcast how, after this, Sylvia finally accepted she'd been scammed.
'Her face went ashen, she was sitting on the sofa, motionless, like someone had sucked the blood from her. It was a horrible sight.'
The investigation into Juliette D'Souza continued for two years, and in 2012 she was arrested and charged with 20 counts of obtaining property by deception and three counts of fraud.
After a trial at Blackfriars Crown Court in May 2014, she was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The judge said it was the worst case of fraud he'd seen.
'D'Souza knew there would be people in Hampstead who would believe what she was saying and would have the money.
'Equally, if you had a loved one who had six months to live and someone told you that they could save them, could you live with yourself if you didn't try?' says Hannah.
D'Souza became eligible for parole in 2019, and has since been seen in Hampstead.
Meanwhile, Sylvia developed dementia and when Maria visited, would often become terrified, thinking D'Souza was coming to take more money.
She died in 2021, penniless and a shell of her former self. Keith now lives in France and remains interested in alternative therapies.
Little is known about D'Souza's whereabouts, but the podcasters query whether a spell in jail will have changed her.
'She's a predator,' says Suruthi.
'There are still questions as to whether the events in Hampstead were her first rodeo. And you have to ask whether they'll be her last.'
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The Guardian
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BBC News
2 hours ago
- BBC News
These touts made millions - and claimed staff at big ticketing firms helped
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Meanwhile, Ticketmaster had publicly insisted that it was trying to combat ticket touting, which can be illegal in some company - one of the UK's biggest ticket sellers - was in a unique position until 2018, as a ticketing website which also owned two major resale Ticketmaster was not involved or represented in either of these court cases, the judges' comments about the industry suggested that the full story may not yet have been told. We wanted to investigate what was going on before the company shut its resale sites in spoke to former and current ticketing staff, who enjoyed working for Ticketmaster but in some cases were concerned that fans might have been short-changed. We also spoke to promoters, venue managers and consultants, and combed through court we heard was that ticket touts had inside help with their business buying and selling tickets from the ticketing platforms they used: Former staff at resale sites which Ticketmaster used to own told us they worked closely with touts, and court documents at Chenery-Woods' trial revealed two staff at those companies bought tickets for toutsTouts trading huge volumes of tickets were offered financial "incentives" by resale sites, Hunter alleged during his trialEmail evidence in court suggested one tout was offered a meeting with a top Ticketmaster lawyer to "brainstorm" ways the company could help themOther former Ticketmaster employees told us they were asked to develop software to help touts sell tickets in bulk on resale sites Ticketmaster said in a statement that the allegations refer to "companies that were dissolved in 2018 and alleged events from over a decade ago, which have no relevance to today's ticketing landscape"."Revisiting outdated claims about long-defunct businesses only serves to confuse and mislead the public," the company added that Ticketmaster has "no involvement in the uncapped resale market" now and said: "We have always been committed to fair and secure ticketing." When reselling tickets becomes a crime Hunter and Chenery-Woods were not the kind of touts who stand outside a venue discreetly asking passers-by to buy or sell tickets. These two turned their spare rooms into registered, tax-paying companies and made millions from trading tickets online, the courts Andrews, who leads National Trading Standards' e-crimes unit and was involved in the investigation into Hunter and the Ticket Queen, told the BBC how he joined the early morning raid on the anonymous townhouse in a tree-lined north London street where Hunter ran his was a room filled with PCs, whirring away, buying and selling tickets. "It was obviously an operation that ran pretty much 24/7," Mr Andrews said. They also found rolls of tickets in seat-number order for events such as Lady Gaga concerts and the Harry Potter play, and multiple credit tickets for profit for live performances in the UK is not illegal. But Hunter and Chenery-Woods were convicted of using fraudulent practices to get around restrictions - such as limits on the number of tickets an individual can pretended to be lots of different people, using lots of different credit cards, when they bought the tickets from companies such as Ticketmaster, See Tickets or AXS - which are known as primary ticketing websites. The Ticket Queen used the details of family members, including a dead relative, to buy tickets, as well as using the names and addresses of dozens of people in and around the town of Diss, Norfolk where her business sell the tickets, the touts used resale sites, which are known as the secondary ticketing websites. The 'VIP' touts who made millions for resale sites Touts were "working hand-in-hand with resale platforms", Mr Andrews told us.A former staffer at Ticketmaster-owned Seatwave, who asked to remain anonymous, told us touts were "VIPs" on the resale site. "They were doing a lot of business for us. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions."Some staff at Seatwave had a cosy relationship with touts, according to the former employee, who said he would take Paul Douglas - the Ticket Queen's former brother-in-law, also convicted of fraud - out for a pint when he visited sites make their money from fees paid by buyers and commission from the sellers - court papers show these could be as much as 25% of the resale price. Prosecutors calculated that Hunter's company received sales revenue of £26.4m over about seven-and-a-half years. Based on their typical commission, the UK's four main resale sites could have received £8.8m between them from Hunter's sales alone. Touts who consistently delivered large volumes of tickets to customers were offered discounts by resale platforms, industry sources told us. During the case where he was convicted of fraud, Peter Hunter alleged that GetMeIn! - another Ticketmaster-owned company - offered him "incentives" for selling in bulk, such as £4,000 cashback if he hit sales of £550,000 over a three-month sources told us that some touts also sourced tickets directly through relationships with promoters and venues, but sales at Hunter's level were far beyond what any regular customer could acquire legitimately from primary ticketing though the primary ticketing companies were victims of the fraud - as their purchase limits were breached by the use of false identities - Mr Andrews said none of the primary ticketing companies "directly supported" the former employee who worked in Ticketmaster's resale technical team, who also wanted to remain anonymous, told the BBC his team would work closely with touts, developing software that helped them sell tickets in the secondary market."You have to build a relationship with them, they're like a customer basically," he said. The team would show touts products and ask for feedback, including if they made selling tickets easier for them and often showing them multiple versions, he said. Tip-offs, multiple accounts and fake names We have been told that resale sites would liaise with big sellers, like court, Hunter alleged a senior boss at GetMeIn! would help him by passing on information from Ticketmaster's legal department such as "government reports maybe from select committees" and ringing him weekly to tip him off about forthcoming sales before the public learned about senior employee had described in emails how he added a "new privilege" to the accounts of "top brokers" - the resale sites' term for touts - which would allow them to automatically "drip feed" large inventories of tickets on to the emails were read in court as evidence from Peter Hunter's defence team, suggesting that the senior GetMeIn! boss offered to help stop Hunter's tickets being cancelled by Ticketmaster when he had fallen foul of a purchase court heard that the senior employee had written: "I think Ticketmaster are looking at cancelling primary bookings that have exceeded the ticket limit. However, if I flag them as GMI [GetMeIn!], I should be able to save them." Hunter's defence alleged the correspondence showed the GetMeIn! boss knew the tout had multiple Ticketmaster accounts which he used to buy more tickets than the site's restrictions multiple names and identities to buy more tickets than the limit allowed was one of the reasons Hunter was jailed for the trial of the Ticket Queen, the prosecution said this same GetMeIn! boss and a colleague had both been "complicit or at least indifferent" in her use of a false name on the resale site to conceal the fact that the account belonged to a court heard that Maria Chenery-Woods had emailed the two men asking to change her account name from "Ticket Queen" to "Elsie Marshall" in February both court cases, the prosecution questioned why it was necessary for the accused to pretend to be other people to buy tickets if, as the defendants alleged, Ticketmaster knew what they were doing. How separate was Ticketmaster from its former resale sites? The links with touts such as Hunter went right to the highest levels of Ticketmaster's group of companies, according to emails read out in court as evidence. They record the same senior GetMeIn! boss proposing a meeting between Hunter and Selina Emeny, the company's top legal representative and a director of Live Nation Ltd, an arm of Ticketmaster's parent proposed meeting in 2015 was intended to "address any worries" Hunter might have about a change in the law around ticket resale and "brainstorm what more can be done by our legal team to help UK brokers".Ms Emeny is currently listed as an active director of 50 companies on Companies House, all related to Live Nation and maintained that its resale platforms, GetMeIn! and Seatwave, operated as "separate entities", in the words of then chairman Chris Edmonds at a 2016 House of Commons select committee both Mr Edmonds and Ms Emeny were directors of Ticketmaster UK Ltd and the holding company which owned Seatwave. Ms Emeny was also a director and secretary of GetMeIn! and at one time, all three companies operated out of the same open-plan office in central London. David Brown, who worked in Ticketmaster's technology teams between 2011 and 2017, also told the BBC the companies had close enough links that they could have found out who was buying tickets in bulk and putting them up for resale on Ticketmaster's other said Ticketmaster and its resale sites used "a lot of the same infrastructure" and it would have been easy to "link everything together". "You're not building completely separate databases," he said it meant Ticketmaster could have connected the accounts and credit cards originally purchasing tickets with those selling in bulk on resale sales, and stop them reselling."We should be able to pull enough data to say there's something not right about this, this isn't just members of the public selling tickets. If they wanted to really tackle the problem, they had all the tools in one place to do that," he Homann, who was the then resale managing director of Ticketmaster/GetMeIn!, said in 2014 to a group of MPs that "they are able to cross-reference" some tickets on GetMeIn! "against Ticketmaster's records" to report suspected frauds. The employee in Ticketmaster's resale technology team who developed software to help touts also told the BBC that there was a senior executive who had "oversight" over elements of the primary selling and resale side of the operation. That person could easily have accessed an internal list of top-selling brokers, the employee said the executive "would definitely ask that question, ask for that information. I can't believe that wouldn't be seen by him".Mr Edmonds, Ticketmaster's chairman in 2016, had told Parliament that the company did not have "visibility" over how the sellers on its resale platforms acquired those tickets - but these accounts suggest Ticketmaster could have found out if they were buying them on their own also asked the other two large resale ticketing platforms, Viagogo and Stubhub about their relationships with large sellers, including account managers and inventory management told us such facilities are "standard industry practice", but it "takes its responsibilities under the law very seriously". It said it had a business relationship with Hunter, Smith and two of the Ticket Queen's accomplices "before they were found to be guilty of any fraudulent activity"."Bad actors go against what we stand for and Viagogo is in full support of the legal action taken against them," the company International told the BBC, it is "fully compliant with UK regulations and provides industry-leading consumer protections." It added: "As a marketplace we provide a safe, trusted and transparent platform for the buying and selling of tickets, and enforce strict measures to protect consumers against fraud." Resale site staff were working for the touts Some employees of companies then owned by Ticketmaster were occasionally paid by touts to buy tickets on their behalf, the prosecution told the court in the Ticket Queen prosecution added the Ticket Queen's accomplices paid two GetMeIn! employees out of a separate bank account from the usual company one. According to a Skype message read in court, one accomplice said: "It will be best as it won't show a GMI employee being paid by TQ Tickets."One of her buyers was an employee at GetMeIn! who received £8,500 in less than a year from this sideline, the prosecution said. Our research found this employee's day job was to source replacement tickets when sellers failed to deliver, as they sometimes resale platforms would sometimes buy tickets from touts to fulfil orders in these circumstances, a SeatWave employee told the BBC. The touts would behave "like the mafia", and raise their prices when they knew the resale platform itself was in the market for tickets, the employee presented in court suggested help for the touts to buy tickets in bulk also came from another well-known company: American Express, which offers its cardholders privileged access to tickets for events through pre-sales. Promoters say sponsors like American Express are important in making events such as Formula One and British Summer Time Hyde Park Hunter told the court he had received a LinkedIn message out of the blue from a representative at the credit card company. The rep was offering "as many additional cards as you wanted" in the form of Platinum business credit cards with an "unlimited spend", according to Hunter. The Amex representative wrote that he was aware of Ticketmaster's purchasing limit of six tickets per day on each credit card and told Hunter "there are ways around this with American Express".The rep also suggested in an email to Peter Hunter that his vice-president at the company was "happy to waive card fees" and that the VP's "initial offer was to waive 15 card fees for £250k spend in the first two months".American Express told the BBC: "When we identify instances of misconduct, we investigate the issues raised and take appropriate steps to address them, including disciplinary action with employees as necessary." Has anything changed now? Ticketmaster announced the closure of its resale sites, GetMeIn! and Seatwave in 2018, months after Peter Hunter was charged. Now it allows resales through its main site instead and says prices are capped at the ticket's face Ticketmaster is now trying to "capture the value" of the resale market through different tiers of pricing for tickets labelled as "in demand" or "Platinum" tickets, as UK managing director Andrew Parsons told the House of Commons earlier this year."We think it is absolutely right that artists should be able to price a small amount of the tickets at a higher price to be able to keep overall prices down and capture some of that value away from the secondary market," he said. But ticket touts are still very much active. Minutes after Beyonce's first pre-sale started in February for the UK leg of her Cowboy Carter tour, hundreds of the tickets appeared on resale sites such as told us that "speculative listings" are not allowed on its platform and that it "[does] not support the use of bots which operate during sales on the primary market"."Although the primary platforms do say that they have measures in place to try and prevent touts buying large numbers of tickets, it's quite evident that that practice took place then and still takes place now," said Mr Andrews from National Trading he said "the current situation is that we're not funded or we haven't got sufficient resources to continue to pursue further touts". If you have information about this story that you would like to share please get in touch. Email ticketinginvestigation@ Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist.
BBC News
2 hours ago
- BBC News
West London couple used Apple AirTag to retrieve stolen Jaguar
A west London couple said they tracked down and reclaimed their stolen Jaguar after police were "too stretched" to Forbes Pirie and husband Mark Simpson discovered the theft from outside their home in Brook Green, Hammersmith, on the morning of Tuesday, 3 reported the theft to police, explaining that an Apple AirTag had been left in the car. But after receiving what they described as a "vague" response, they used the tracker to locate the vehicle in Chiswick - and retrieved it Metropolitan Police confirmed the couple had informed officers of their intention to recover the car and were advised to contact police again if assistance was needed at the scene. Ms Forbes Pirie said: "I went to use the car that morning, walking up and down the street and I was unable to find it, with my husband saying he hadn't moved it."I thought it was weird, we both thought it was unlikely it was stolen because it had two immobilisers and so I was quite shocked and my stomach dropped." 'Bit of an adventure' As well as having an immobiliser fitted, which means the Jaguar E-Pace would not start without the correct PIN code, it also had an AirTag couple dialled 999 to report the theft. Ms Forbes Pirie said the police were "vague" and told them they might send a patrol car and would inform them if they found anything. Ms Forbes Pirie said they told the police they had the tracker and could could trace the car's location - explaining that it was only a nine minute drive away, in Chiswick."I wanted to act quite quickly as my fear was that we would find the AirTag and not the car when it was discarded on to the street without the car, so I told them that we were planning to head to the location," she said."It felt like a bit of an adventure, it was exciting, a little bit of a fun thing to do, to see if we could find our car."I didn't really think car thieves would hurt us, more that they would try to get away." She said they were "relieved" to find the car where the AirTag had led them - in a parking space on a street in the immobiliser code did not work, so they had to contact the software company to retrieve the vehicle. After showing proof of ownership of the £46,000 car, the company came to the location and unlocked the vehicle for of the thieves, Ms Forbes Pirie said: "I think they wanted just to take the car somewhere quiet. The thieves appeared to be quite sophisticated. "They had managed to bypass the immobiliser that came with the car, but not the one that we had fitted. "We were told they did quite a good job and got quite close."I think I thought the police would act quicker considering they had a location for it, but I know they also very stretched." Met figures show there were 33,530 offences of "theft or unauthorised taking" of a motor vehicle in the capital in 2024, a 1.6% increase on the year before. There were only 326 "positive outcomes", which can include a charge or caution, from those cases, representing a success rate of lower than 1%. A Met Police spokesperson said the couple confirmed with police that they had found the vehicle and that it was being recovered by a truck back to the victim's home address."This investigation is ongoing and officers met the victim on Tuesday, 10 June as part of their inquiries," the spokesperson added.
