A former events manager at Yorkshire Cancer Research has been jailed for more than four years for defrauding the charity of over £85k by pretending to have cancer.

According to The Guardian, 42-year old Patricia Robertshaw was sentenced by a judge who claimed she had “shown no shame” in pretending to have radiotherapy to earn three months’ sick pay from the organisation.

During the period in which she was signed off work, Robertshaw applied for other jobs using fake degree certificates, which she had also used when applying for her job at Yorkshire Cancer Research.

The Guardian said prosecutors announced the documents had helped her to push for a pay rise of over £10,000 at the charity, which she’d been earning for seven months. Over the period in which she was an employee at the charity, she’d earned a total of £86,833.

Robertshaw was caught by other employees of the charity when they found the QR codes on her sick notes to be invalid.

She pleaded guilty to a total of four counts of fraud and one count of forgery and will be sentenced for over four years.

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