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Playboy poser sentenced to jail

A 31-year-old Swedish woman was found guilty by the Borås District Court on Thursday for defrauding several men she met online, falsely claiming to be a model for Playboy magazine.

Published: 1 May 2009 09:12 CEST

The court convicted her of serious fraud, sentencing her to a year-and-a-half in prison and ordering her to pay 282,000 kronor ($35,100) in damages.

The woman lured the men with a picture of Cori Nadine, an American Playboy playmate.

After chatting with the men online, the woman asked for money, regaling them with tall tales of a fictional daughter who was suffering from leukemia and close to death. She also claimed she was being pursued by the mob.

Her heart-wrenching pleas prompted the men to send her thousands of kronor.

One man even took out a loan in order to help with the fictional daughter’s plight, being told he would be repaid with money from her modeling work.

Altogether, the 31-year-old woman, who has a prior conviction for fraud, managed to extract over 500,000 kronor from her unwitting victims.

“I am ashamed and don’t understand why I did it. I drained my savings account of 100,000 kronor,” one of the men told Borås Tidning newspaper.

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OFFBEAT

Swedish police remove sculpture mistaken for suicide victim

Police on the island of Gotland removed a public sculpture from the Galgberget nature reserve near Visby on the grounds that it is just too creepy.

Published: 9 March 2019 16:50 CET
Swedish police remove sculpture mistaken for suicide victim
The gallows at Galgeberget. Photo: Artifex/WikiCommons
According to local news site Hela Gotland, someone was out for a stroll on Galgeberget (the Gallows Hill) on Wednesday when they saw what they thought was a body hanging after a suicide. Local police were contacted but when they went to investigate they instead found a sculpture by artist Jessica Lundeberg. 
 
The artwork, entitled ‘The Watcher in the Woods’, is a partially transparent plate sculpture that looks like a spooky little girl. 
 
 
Despite discovering that the suspected suicide victim was actually artwork, police determined that Lundeberg’s piece could scare others and thus took the sculpture down. 
 
“It was decided that if it were to remain, more people would likely be frightened in the same way,” Gotland police spokesman Ayman Aboulaich told Radio P4 Gotland. 
 
Lundeberg told Hela Gotland that the sculpture has been at Galgeberget since a public art project last summer and that this was the first time it had caused any concern. She said ‘The Watcher in the Woods’ was the only piece that was allowed to remain after the end of the project. But now it is there no more. 
 
 
Lundeberg has taken the sculpture back to her studio. While she hopes it will eventually return to Galgeberget, the artist told Hela Gotland it seems unlikely.  
 
She said that the sculpture was damaged by police. 
 
“It was ragged, dismantled and broken. I was horrified when I saw it,” she said. 
 
Police have reportedly promised to pay any necessary repair costs.
 
Although the person who reported the sculpture to the police has not spoken with the media, their jump to conclusions could perhaps be attributed to the nature reserve’s macabre history. Galgeberget is still home to gallows that were used to hang criminals for centuries. The last execution to be held at the site was in 1845, according to Hela Gotland. 
 
 
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