Eighteen-year-old Holly Kelland and seventeen-year-old Codie Farrar from the UK were sentenced to two years in jail for attempting to kidnap children through the internet.
“The duo attempted to lure their targets by advertising competitions and telling some they had won prizes in fictitious raffles and boasted rewards of designer baby clothes,” said a Mama Mia report. “In doing so, the school friends tried to dupe naive parents in handing out both contact details and home addresses.”
One mother fell into their trap, giving the girls her home address. Soon thereafter, Codie Farrar dropped by at the mother’s home pretending to be a social worker and claiming that she needed to take the baby with her for a quick “medical assessment.”
It will only last for a half-hour, she said.
The mother almost agreed. That is, until she noticed the way with Codie Farrar was incorrectly holding her baby’s head.
She grew suspicious then, and eventually decided to call social services.
In a Sun article, the mother said that she hasn’t yet fully recovered from the incident.
“After it happened I kept breaking down at the thought of what could have happened if the baby had been taken,” she wrote. “I cried all the time and it ruined my experience of having a young baby. Even now I don’t trust people and don’t like being home alone.”
Meanwhile, according to the Daily Mail, the judge who sentenced the two girls said that their crime was of “extreme seriousness” and that the “distress caused to the babies and their mothers should not be underestimated.”
“A plan was hatched to kidnap a baby and not followed through, and fortunately it was only the alertness of the mother that prevented the actual kidnap taking place,” he said.
“It was not a momentary decision but a prolonged period of action which involved setting up of a fake Facebook account to obtain details of new-born babies and families’ details.”
It is still unknown why the two girls wanted to kidnap children and what their plans were for them.
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