Adelaide mum jailed for faking cancer, conning $300K from friends, family

An Adelaide mother has been jailed for falsely claiming she had cancer and duping her friends of family of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Kelly Val Smith, 40, was sentenced to at least two years in jail on Wednesday.

She pleaded guilty to four counts of deception and one count of dishonestly dealing with documents between June 2012 and February 2015. She was given four years and 19 days in jail, with a non-parole period of two years.

The District Court heard that Smith pretended to have ovarian cancer and cancer of the lymph nodes, telling her loved ones that she needed money for treatment. She also told them that her son needed to undergo an urgent operation for a heart condition. She had duped them of more than $300,000 from 2012 to 2015.

Smith, who has three children, promised to pay them back with the money she was allegedly expecting from being a victim of crime payout of more than $1 million, the ABC reports. She claimed she would be compensated for the psychological issues she had suffered from being a witness to an armed robbery. She also said her bank account had been hacked and her accounts frozen pending the outcome of an investigation by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

Her victims include three of her childhood friends and her stepmother-in-law, Michelle Ingley-Smith, who were each conned out of between $12,000 and $100,000.

Smith read a letter of apology to the court and addressed her victims before she was sentenced. However, Chief Judge Michael Evans said he did not believe that Smith, who previously pleaded not guilty before agreeing to a plea bargain, was genuinely remorseful. He said the lateness of her guilty plea and her lack of any prior apology, as well as any explanation to what she had done with the money, meant that she was not truly repentant.

“Her actions were evil, as far as we’re concerned,” Ingley-Smith told reporters outside the court. She said her stepson’s relationship with his father had become strained due to Smith’s doing.

“As a family, this doesn’t end for us. We still have relationships that still need repairing.”

Smith has never explained what she had done with the money she conned out of her loved ones.