Mira Solmaz, a former nurse, used her patient’s cards to fund personal purchases and pay off her debts
A healthcare worker has been jailed for using cancer patients’ credit cards.
MIra Solmaz, 33, formerly worked as a nurse at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the City of London where she targeted the vulnerable patients she was supposed to be looking after during the Covid lockdown.
There was around £1,660 worth of fraudulent purchases, City of London Police said.
One of her victims, Hazel Longhurst, 65, said she had worked in the NHS ’my whole life’ and ‘I couldn’t believe that someone like that could be employed’.
Ms Longhurst, herself a palliative care worker who was receiving treatment for a highly aggressive strain of cancer at the time, said: ‘I just didn’t know that someone could be that evil, to prey on vulnerable people.
‘My whole career has been with helping people and caring for people.
‘I couldn’t believe someone could be in that sort of job with that responsibility and do what she did.’
One of Solmaz’s victims as Hazel Longhurst, a retired fellow healthcare worker, who at the time of the fraud was receiving treatment for a form of cancer that carried just a 5% chance of survival (Picture: PA Wire)
Reading her victim statement out in court, Ms Longhurst added: ‘I felt very violated and very vulnerable and became paranoid of any member of staff coming into my room.’
Having been told at one stage she likely had little more than a 5% chance of survival, Ms Longhurst first became aware something was awry after receiving text messages from her bank explaining there had been unusual activity on her cards.
Ms Longhurst said she spent hours on the phone getting the cards cancelled from her hospital bed, at a time when the pandemic was causing disruption to services.
‘I was extremely ill. They didn’t think I was going to pull through,’ she said.
‘I was fighting for my life. I was in there a long time.’
It was only after her daughter encouraged her to contact the police that the full scale of Ms Solmaz’s fraud began to become apparent.
Another victim of the scheme was Todd Mallonee, who who was also a cancer inpatient at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and died in 2021 at the age of 48.
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More than £360 worth of transactions on Mr Mallonee’s cards were linked to Solmaz, who had used his accounts to pay for food deliveries, clothes and AirPods, as well as paying off her personal debts.
Charlotte O’Conner, who represented Solmaz during the recent proceedings, said her client had been experiencing complex mental health issues.
Judge Gregory Perrins nevertheless told Solmaz at sentencing: ‘You took advantage of their obvious vulnerability, in the most grotesque breach of trust.’
A spokesperson for Barts Health NHS Trust said that Solmaz had been fired from her job at the hospital following an internal investigation into the allegations in December 2022.
She will serve 15 months in prison.
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