Glam Brit charged over ‘£9.5m holiday sickness scam’ ran infamous Magaluf bar where teen performed sex acts for drink
A BRITISH mum charged over a holiday food poisoning scam ran an infamous Magaluf bar where a teenager performed sex acts for a drink.
Essex-born Laura Joyce, 42, is one of eight accused of swindling three Majorca hotels out of around £9.5million after tourists were convinced to make fake claims.
Laura, charged under her maiden name Cameron, and her brother Marc Cameron Grimstead are accused of being the ringleaders.
After Laura was arrested, her Magaluf club Playhouse was identified as the venue where a British tourist was filmed performing sex acts on 24 men for a cheap drink in the summer of 2014.
At the time, Laura was fined £45,000 after footage of the incident at the club went viral.
The 18-year-old woman, who was part of a bar crawl organised by Carnage Magaluf, performed a sex act on two dozen strangers in the belief she would win a "holiday" - but the prize was actually a £4 cocktail named "Holiday".
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Laura shut Playhouse down after she and Carnage were fined by the council – before reopening it as The Project under her business name KLM Ventures.
A year later in 2015, the mum-of-three axed the bar for good.
A source previously told The Sun on Sunday: "The video of the girl performing oral sex and two dozen lads was sickening for everyone who saw it – none more so than the local Majorca authorities.
"Booze-fuelled contests like that have left Magaluf with a reputation for scandal."
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An investigating court has accused the Laura and her brother of forming a "profit-motivated organised gang" with five other suspects through a Spanish company they called Elite Project Marketing SL.
They have been charged with fraud and membership of a criminal gang.
If found guilty, they could face at least eight years in jail if they are proven to have defrauded more than 400,000 Euros.
The siblings now face trial along with five other Brits they allegedly hired to persuade holidaymakers to make bogus claims, as well as a UK-based businessman who processed them.
They have been named as Ryan Bridges; Simon Robert Flanagan; Tegan Jewel Sumerlee; Susan Amanda Lyle; Nicola Marie Sanderson; and Peter Carl Murphy.
More than 800 tourists made claims against one of the hotels - with just 38 of them needing genuine medical assistance.
A six-page ruling issued by a court in Majorca said: "The gang specialised in obtaining the details of British tourists in all-inclusive hotels in Majorca it convinced, through a form they themselves elaborated, to falsely claim they had been ill during their stay in one of those hotels and be able to claim compensation in the UK."
Detectives are said to have estimated the losses of the three hotel groups as a result of the alleged scam between 2016 and 2017 at around £9.5 million.
Laura was arrested in September 2017 and was pictured in handcuffs while heavily pregnant.
After she appeared in court in May 2018, her lawyer Gabriel Llado said she had admitted to passing on the names and phone numbers of holidaymakers for payment but insisted it was part of a pure market research exercise.
He insisted neither Laura nor any of the so-called “claims farmers” she used to gather data of tourists she passed on to others in the UK, encouraged them to get chemist’s receipts so they could make fake food poisoning claims as police and hoteliers’ representatives have claimed.
And he claimed Laura had spent just a few months doing it and stopped because she was earning very little.
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Do you know any of the alleged scammers? Get in touch by emailing [email protected]
