A Scots supermarket worker has been warned she could be sent to prison after she conned the National Lottery out of nearly £50,000.
Melanie Davies admitted carrying out a fraud which netted her £47,000 in under a year while she was working as a till cashier at a branch of Asda.
Davies, 35, tampered with winning tickets on a number of occasions to defraud the lottery company out of the money.
Davies, of Scott Street, Brechin, admitted to repeatedly pretending to the National Lottery that higher sums were due to be paid out on tickets.
She admitted she was working at the supermarket giant’s Milton of Craigie store between August 23, 2022, and July 12, 2023, when the fraud took place.
She induced National Lottery to pay out higher sums than necessary on winning tickets and pocketed the excess cash herself, Dundee Sheriff Court was told.
Fiscal depute Sam Craib told the court Davies had no previous convictions, but further details of the fraud will be given to the court at her next appearance.
Sheriff Neil Kinnear deferred sentence for social work background reports and bail was continued until she returns to court on 4 November.
He said: “It’s quite a lot of money. Reports will address the various sentencing options, such as community payback, or imprisonment at one end of the scale.
“If there is something going on in the background of your life then you need to tell them about that.”
A source close to the case said: “The process is that the supermarket pays out on winning tickets and then claims the money back from National Lottery.
“It seems that she was somehow managing to put through claims for higher amounts than people had actually won and it was then being paid out in full.
“Davies was then skimming off the extra amount in cash from each of the manipulated tickets, while the winning customers got the proper amount they were due.
“It seems a very simple con and you would have thought that the supermarket or National Lottery might have picked up on what she was doing a bit earlier than they did.”
Davies admitted a reduced figure in the charge after the Crown accepted her guilty plea to taking £47,000. She had initially been accused of taking over £52,000.
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