Accountant Steals and Gambles Away £350,000 - Walks Free

(Photo: Standard.co.uk)

Public perception of online poker warmed up a bit over the years, but it isn't exactly stellar. For every story, painting our favorite game as a matter of skill enjoyed by bright minds, or a slightly eccentric yet fascinating way of making money, we get reports regarding unfavourable legislation - like the recent online poker ban in Australia - and cautionary tales about gambling addicts.

Natalie Saul is at the forefront of the latter sort of story, although her example is considerably more interesting than your average piece about gamblers, ruining their lives at the online poker tables.

Epic £350k Hit and Run 

Natalie Saul, a 37 year old accountant and mother of one, decided to do her best impression of Fedor Holz by way of Bernie Madoff or Ray Bitar. She was an author of an epic poker-themed hit and run, except she didn't use her superior luck and skill to make a fortune at the tables and retire quickly like the aforementioned German poker wizard.

Natalie utilized her accounting prowess to steal £350,000 from a tech company Idio that she was an employee of, by submitting more than 400 fake invoices and then promptly gambled away around a quarter of a million pounds at online poker tables. The entire rigmarole took place between March 2015 and December 2016. Natalie's transgressions were discovered by another accountant when she went on maternity leave, by which point Mrs. Saul plead guilty to one count of fraud. 

Please, Judge - One Time!

It's pretty safe to say that Mrs. Saul won't be winning any "employee of the month" awards. However, she emerged from this entire situation relatively unscathed. Natalie was given a two-year suspended sentence, 250 hours unpaid work and - wait for it - £360 fee by Judge Catherine Newman, which sounds beyond merciful and extremely controversial. Judge Newman admitted that the sentence was “wholly exceptional”, and way outside of the sentencing guidelines.

She was ready to sentence Saul to much more reasonable three years and four months in prison, but she got persuaded that Natalie "is not the stuff prisoners are made of". Judge Newman named family tragedy back from 2013 as one of the main extenuating circumstances.

"(The crime) has caused considerable harm to your employer which could ill afford to lose such a substantial sum, but thankfully survived. Your grandmother’s death rocked the stability of your hitherto good citizenship".

On the one hand, the fact that Natalie's fraud lasted for more than a year and a half, should be a clear sign of premeditation, on the other Judge Catherine Newman certainly had the access to more information than we could ever gather and presumably made the most of it with her highly unusual sentencing.

Natalie Saul burst into tears as her sentence was read, and that emotional reaction was hopefully equal parts relief and remorse. We might say that this whole story had a happy ending, if not for the fact that Idio - the company that employed Mrs. Saul - unwillingly pumped a bunch of money into online poker economy and the fact that the story of Natalie Saul will have a minuscule but measurable effect on the public perception of poker, tipping the scales in a direction poker players really don't care for.