A Prince George woman who used her employer's credit cards to satisfy a penchant for online gambling has been sentenced to a 16-month conditional sentence order - effectively house arrest - followed by 20 months probation.
Chantal Loring, 35, was also ordered to pay $32,973 restitution for the amount her employer was unable to recover from the B.C. Lottery Corporation, under the terms issued August 22 by Prince George Provincial Court Judge Michael Brecknell.
According to a reasons for sentence, Loring was hired in November 2018 by an agency that provides nurses and other health care professionals on a temporary basis. Her duties included booking travel and hotels using company credit cards.
She signed an agreement that the cards would be used only for the bookings she made as part of her employment but within a month the credit card company's fraud department alerted her employer that the cards were being used to transfer money to a PlayNow account.
The cards were cancelled and two new cards issued. But they too were added to the PlayNow account, registered to Loring, and the unauthorized transfers continued. As well, a portion of the funds were transferred from the PlayNow account to her personal bank accounts.
Slightly less than three months after she had been hired, Loring was fired from her job and arrested at the office by RCMP on counts of theft over $5,000 and fraud over $5,000.
It was not the first time Loring had committed such offences.
In February 2017, she stole cheques from a social agency where she was working and wrote more than $10,000 to herself and paid bills with them. In January 2022, she was sentenced to two years probation and ordered to pay $4,469.85 restitution.
At the same hearing, she was also sentenced to an 18-month conditional discharge for shoplifting at a Prince George grocery store in February 2018.
Crown counsel had argued for 9-12 months in jail followed by two years probation, but in reaching his decision, Brecknell made note of the effort Loring has made in the four years since her arrest to turn her life around.
At the time of the offence, Loring was taking eight-plus Tylenol 3 pills daily, which made her thinking cloudy and disconnected. Since the arrest, she reduced the intake and by August 2022 had completely stopped taking them.
"The RCMP arrested Ms. Loring at work rather than serving her a summons at her residence. Though this was humiliating, Ms. Loring feels that was the wakeup call she desperately needed and may well have saved her life.
"In custody, she accepted that her T3 use was out of control as she started detoxing in cells. She is profoundly regretful that it took an arrest for her to 'get clean.'"
Loring has also admitted she suffers from a gambling addiction and has received some counselling for the problem. She has also removed all online gambling applications from her phone and gave up her smart phone so that she will not be tempted to gamble.
And although currently on leave, Loring has completed "return to work" interviews for a job that does not involve handling money and where her supervisor is aware of her criminal convictions.
Brecknell found Loring poses a low risk to reoffend given her present form of employment. While on a conditional sentence order, she can return to work, make restitution payments and care for her family, the judge also noted.
Except for work and medical reasons, and for brief periods to attend to personal needs, Loring must remain at her home for the first eight months of the conditional sentence order and is subject to a curfew for the remainder. Conditions during her probation include completing 30 hours of community service work.
