A BENEFITS cheat who invented 11 children to claim £17,000 now faces jail for forging a bank statement to pretend she was paying back the cash.
Lisa Watson, 28, is already awaiting sentence for making fraudulent claims to benefit agencies.
She had been given a chance to pay back the money, but last month a sheriff ordered a police investigation into the repayments.
His suspicion came about when Watson’s then solicitor, Diane MacFarlane, withdrew from representing her over doubts about the authenticity of information provided by her client.
The 28-year-old has now pleaded guilty to a new charge of attempting to pervert justice by uttering as genuine to her lawyer a forged bank statement.
It falsely showed payments she claimed to have made between May 9 and August 9, 2010.
She admitted this was done with the intention of misleading the court into accepting she had repaid more than she had.
Watson was 24 when she invented names and birthdays for 11 non-existent children, ranging in age from one to 13, including some said to be born just days apart.
Sheriff David Sutherland has previously warned her that she faced jail if the cash was not repaid and the case has been put off several times to allow Watson to prove she is making repayments. It was on this issue that her latest lawyer withdrew from representing her.
Watson had told HM Revenue and Customs she had 11 children to obtain £16,787. She carried out the fraud while she had only one child and, bizarrely, did not claim benefits for her real offspring.
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