Laurence Dollimore
A WELL known island expat has denied recruiting British holidaymakers to file fake sickness claims on behalf of UK law firms.
Brit Laura Cameron insisted a gang of touts who worked for her did not target tourists to persuade them to file false holiday claims.
Instead, her Mallorca-based ‘tiquiteros’ merely collected data for a range of different purposes, she told a Palma court.
Cameron was arrested in September along with six other people, accused of creating a network dedicated to defrauding hotel chains, including the giant Melia group and Mac Hotels.
She is being sued by the groups, alongside the Mallorca Hoteliers Federation.
Cameron, 28, told Judge Maria Perez Ruiz however, that her company Elite Project Marketing was merely ‘an information collection company’ for British marketing firms.
“We collect telephone numbers and names of British tourists and we sell the data to marketing companies, which buy telephone numbers and names in case anything happens during their holiday in Mallorca, this includes food poisoning,” she insisted.
“We collect information by talking to tourists on the street, but we do not ask them if they have had a food problem, the data we collect is for many different purposes, we collect the data under the criteria they ask us.”
The Calvia-based entrepreneur – whose mother Deborah is a millionaire businesswoman who has lived in Mallorca for three decades – admitted she sold the information to three UK law firms and marketing agencies including UK Holiday Claims and Ruby Diamond.
Another, HH Law Limited paid around €5,500 for around 1,000 names and numbers – equaling €5.5 per contact.
This one company alone paid her €34,717 between October and December 2016, police reports showed.
Her touts were made around €110 for each tourist that ended up filing a sickness claim, although one, Simon Robert F, insisted he never encouraged them to submit false complaints.
Detectives claimed that the sickness scams began in 2014 and that up until 2017, they had cost the industry €60 million around the country.
However, Cameron stressed to the court that she only began collecting data from the end of 2016 until the spring of 2017.
She refused to answer questions from the affected hoteliers.
