Laurence Dollimore
A SERIAL expat fraudster exposed many times by the Olive Press is incredibly STILL making thousands from scamming holidaymakers to Spain.
Paula Neale is apparently conning scores of tourists a month from rental scams, despite being arrested in May, in an ongoing police investigation.
The Olive Press can reveal the British mother-of-two is continuing to snare victims while out on bail, after her arrest in Burgos.
As well as new victims coming forward, we have been contacted by an old friend of Neale, 44, in the UK, who unwittingly allowed her to use her email and her PayPal account.
In an extraordinary three month period up to early June the friend claims she raked in a staggering €18,000 from apparent holiday rental deposits.
In a damning breakdown of the account, which the Olive Press has a copy of, there is a total of at least €17,830 taken via PayPal.
One of the victims Alex McIntyre, who is listed on the payments, said he was scheduled to stay at a villa arranged by Neale – who uses the aliases Paula Kari and Gabriel Goodman – this week in Mijas.
McIntyre paid €700 for the villa near Mijas, where his aunt lives.
But when he showed his aunt the pictures of the villa, she couldn’t recognise the area and when she went to look for it couldn’t find it.
McIntyre tried to contact Paula – who was using her Gabriel alias – but she ignored him until he tried to cancel his PayPal payment.
“She got very angry and demanded I close the PayPal dispute,” McIntyre told the Olive Press, “she blocked me on social media after telling me I would be getting no refund.”
This week her long time friend in the UK, who asked to remain anonymous, told us: “She has to be stopped. It is completely wrong what she is doing.”
The mother-of-two, based in the UK, said she had been contacted at the beginning of the year by Neale, who she had met five years ago when she lived in Kent.
“She said she had had all her belongings stolen and had no money to pay for petrol or feed her children.
“She told me she was in trouble and had to keep changing her name and location due to a stalker and I felt sorry for her,” she continued.
“She said she was getting work writing scripts but she needed a friend to help her collect the payments and I stupidly believed her.”
Over the next four months she agreed to send her Thomas Cook cash passport payments, as the money came in via her PayPal account.
“But that was until a bank flagged up a payment and I did my research and found all your articles and reported her to the UK and Spanish police,” she said.
“It is amazing what she has got up to and I just feel really sad for those kids, who have not had a stable life since they were young.
“They must be teenagers now and I dread to think what effect it has had on them.”
The Olive Press has printed nearly a dozen stories over the past FOUR years detailing how the British fraudster was cheating holidaymakers out of thousands.
Thanks to our tip-offs, the Spanish authorities eventually launched Operation Neale earlier this year in a bid to track her down.
She was eventually picked up in Burgos in May as she was getting into a stolen car.
She had managed to evade police for a number of months by hiding in Girona and even in France, where she set up a new Tinder profile, describing herself as ‘not your typical English woman abroad’.
