Former ‘EastEnders’ Actress Helena Breck Duped by 'Friend' in Hillary Clinton Documentary Scam

A woman from Scotland has been jailed for three years for scamming a former "EastEnders" actress. Anne Mulloy, 63, told her friend and actress Helena Breck that she needed money to fund a documentary that she was making about Hillary Clinton. However, there was no such documentary in the making and Mulloy had been pocketing all the funds which are estimated to be over a hundred thousand pounds, as claimed by the victim, in a BBC report.

Elaborate and sustained exploitation of a friend

Mulloy, who is also known as Anne Leuser, told Breck that she needed money and promised access to Clinton's 2016 US presidential campaign. She claimed she knew Mrs Clinton and would be getting behind-the-scenes access. In the popular show “Eastenders,” Breck played the role of Elizabeth Willmott-Brown, the wife of Kathy Beale's rapist James Willmott-Brown. She also had a recurring role in the 1980s BBC soap opera “Triangle”, which was set onboard a North Sea ferry. She had been part of an episode of the BBC soap opera in 1994 and provided the voice for "unexpected item in the bagging area" for supermarket checkout messages.

Breck from Fraserburgh, Scotland, had repeatedly sent money to her one-time friend Mulloy. As per the BBC report, Breck created a spreadsheet and revealed to the court that an entry dated April 1, 2016, indicated she had paid around £114,000 (~$145,684).

Mulloy’s fantasies and lies were first exposed in 2017 when she was jailed in London for trying to dupe filmmakers out of £120,000 (~$153,351) for a documentary on the Democrat leader.

Earlier this year, she was found guilty of fraud between October 2011 and April 2017. The Peterhead Sheriff Court rumbled her plot, as Sheriff Craig Findlater jailed her for three years.

The original charge was that Mulloy of Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, carried out a fraud of over £85,000 (~$108,630) fraud, which was later amended by the Crown to an unspecified amount. Speaking to BBC Scotland News, Breck said she felt “extremely relieved that justice has finally been served.” She further added that Mulloy had shown no signs of remorse for the trust that she has abused and “the pain she has caused.”  

“I’ll never recover financially from the damage that she has caused, but hope that others might be protected from this callous fraudster, at least for the time that she is in prison,” Breck further said.

While defense counsel for Mulloy, Jordanna Blockley claimed her client had significant health difficulties and there was the option of a community sentence instead of jail, Sheriff Findlater thought otherwise. Findlater stated that she had been convicted of a sustained fraud involving tens of thousands of pounds and had a history of similar fraud. Thus, the sheriff said only a custodial sentence was appropriate due to the scale of the fraud and the lasting impact on the victim.

In a similar case uncovered earlier this year, a wedding guest defrauded her friends out of thousands of pounds on the pretext of booking flights and accommodation for a wedding ceremony in Thailand.

Natalie Green, 41, was paid by her friend’s family and friends to book flights and accommodation in Thailand. However, just days before the event, they found out that nothing had been booked, BBC reported.