A still taken from a video in 2020 where Judith Webby threatens to take a former tenant to the Disputes Tribunal. Photo / Supplied
A still taken from a video in 2020 where Judith Webby threatens to take a former tenant to the Disputes Tribunal. Photo / Supplied
After a man won nearly $28,000 from a woman pretending to be his landlord more of her alleged victims have come forward. They paint a picture of someone who they believe has been running a rental scam spanning a decade. Jeremy Wilkinson reports.
Judith Webby's alleged scam is a simple but effective one, her victims believe.
First she acquires a rental property using a fake name, a glowing list of references and a fabricated story to lull the owner into thinking their house is in safe hands.
Then she poses as the landlord and finds flatmates to fill the rooms; most of whom are immigrants new to the country or young people inexperienced with the world of renting.
They pay bond and rent in advance and move into the house alongside Webby.
But in most instances she turns on them within a week or two.
Webby fabricates some minor indiscretion that her new flatmate has caused - a smelly room, not having found a job quickly enough, leaving the garage door open … it could be anything.
Often she will restrict certain areas of the house, making her flatmates cook and eat in the garage. Sometimes she even makes them ask permission to use the bathroom.
Or she'll simply change the terms of the rental contract in order to provoke a disagreement with the new flatmates.
Then she bullies and harasses them until they move out, forfeiting their bond and rent just to get away from her.
Some of her "tenants" just want to put the experience behind them and don't bother lodging a complaint with either the tenancy or disputes tribunals, or even the police.
Those who do go to the police are often told it's just a tenancy issue. When they go to the Tenancy Tribunal they're told it's a shared-house or flatmate agreement because Webby doesn't actually own the property.
Multiple victims of Webby and her scam came forward in 2013. Photo / Fair Go.
The people who end up at the Disputes Tribunal often win because Webby doesn't show up. But very few that Open Justice have spoken to have received the money she owes them.
It appears she's found a simple but effective loophole to exploit migrants, students and young people out of their bond and rent.
And she's allegedly been doing it for a decade under a range of pseudonyms.
Sometimes she goes by Kathryn or Molly or takes her birth name Jude or Judith, coupled with the last names Castle, Lane, McLeod, Webby, Webbe, Walker or even Flynn.
The list goes on.
Earlier this month Webby was ordered to pay $28,000 by the Human Rights Review Tribunal to a Sudanese immigrant who moved into a house she was posing as the owner of in 2017.
Tarig Elhassan was a telecommunications engineer and university lecturer who travelled here to find work and eventually bring his family over to join him.
But after two months of job-hunting Webby snapped at him, forcing her way into his bedroom and subjecting him to a racist tirade which he recorded on his cellphone.
"I hate immigration. It has done nothing for our way of life, except bring it down to a third-world country, like yours," she told him.
Webby's rant continues for several pages in the tribunal decision where she suggests to Elhassan that he can't get a job because he's lazy, that Kiwis hate immigrants and that they're afraid of Muslims "bombing the s*** out of them".
The real landlord
After Open Justice published Elhassan's story we received a flood of emails from more people claiming to be Webby's victims. Their stories have potentially painted a picture of a serial scammer who preys on the vulnerable.
One of those is Barbara Meyer who rented her five-bedroom Eastern Beach property in Auckland to Webby for six months in 2012 while she and her husband holidayed in France.
Three weeks into that holiday she says they started receiving messages from an Austrian IT worker who had moved into one of the rooms advertised by Webby after immigrating to New Zealand.
He'd been there a week before she told him his room stunk and berated him for working from home.
Things escalated to the point where she locked him out of the house and dumped his belongings outside.
Barbara Meyer rented her five bedroom house in Eastern Beach to Judith Webby in 2012. Photo / Supplied
Soon afterwards he found out she wasn't the owner of the house and was now out of pocket for bond and rent.
"She's just preying on good immigrants that New Zealand needs," Meyer told Open Justice.
Meyer feels immigrants and young people wouldn't stand a chance against the seasoned scammer, and even she'd been taken in by the ruse. She believed Webby's scam was almost "genius if it wasn't so evil".
"She was onto a great thing I suppose. She was living for free and getting rent from the tenants she sublet to - no doubt at a profit.
"Then of course there's bond money and deposits she'd keep on top of that."
As well as the Austrian she also had three Korean primary school-aged boys stay, organised by a homestay company and a nearby primary school.
Another of Webby's tenants told Meyer that she would regularly scream at the boys in her care.
"I really felt for them when I heard about that … imagine that being your first experience of a new country?"
Barbara's son, a former police officer who didn't want to be named, collated the complaints against Webby and took all the information to the police in Auckland.
"She's obtained money by deception, in my book that's pretty clear criminal offending," he says.
"But for police that kind of low-level fraud often just doesn't get a look-in."
The former detective sergeant says it's often seen as a civil matter and put in the "too-hard basket".
While his parents were stuck overseas he evicted Webby from the property and changed the locks.
Despite his evidence the prosecution didn't go anywhere.
Multiple victims of Webby and her scam came forward in 2013. Photo / Fair Go.
Open Justice has been unable to make contact with her over the last few weeks in part due to the sheer number of pseudonyms she cycles through and the frequency she changes address and cellphone numbers.
A close relative of hers who tried unsuccessfully to make contact with her on our behalf, says he hadn't heard from her in several years and suspected she might have gone overseas.
A website that has since been taken down advertised Webby's house sitting services which is believed to be how she acquired many of the rental properties she used to run her scam.
While she's in essence a ghost who's hard to pin down, she has left a trail of disgruntled victims in her wake, and with them a paper trail of police complaints, Disputes Tribunal decisions and abusive texts and emails.
Open Justice has seen documents relating to seven people claiming to be Webby's victims with complaints spanning a decade.
Despite telling each of these people a different name and a different story about who she is they have all verified her identity through several photographs.
A decade-long scam
As far as Open Justice can tell Webby's scam has anything but died down since she was outed on television in 2013.
Anna Nguyễn moved into a flat with her partner that Webby rented under the name Judith Walker just before the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020.
True to her modus operandi Webby changed the day that rent was due to be paid several times until Nguyễn objected, then she harassed them both until they moved out and forfeited their bond.
Disgusted with the way she'd been treated Nguyễn took to Facebook to air her frustrations and was shocked to have her inbox flooded with messages from people who'd experienced something similar.
The house on Anchorage Drive which Judith Webby rented in 2020. Photo / Supplied
So, motivated to see Webby brought to justice she made a police complaint and linked up with some of the other victims to take her to the Disputes Tribunal.
"Sometimes I felt like I wanted to give up because it's only a thousand dollars you know? I just want to live my life," she said.
"But so many people contacted me, we just had to seek justice."
Ultimately Webby didn't show up to court and the tribunal ordered Webby pay Nguyễn $895.
She still hasn't seen a cent of it.
Tracey Baguley, Group Manager of National Service Delivery at the Ministry of Justice says the Disputes Tribunal doesn't have the power to enforce costs it awards to complainants.
"This is because a monetary order made in the Disputes Tribunal is a civil debt, and there are no provisions in legislation empowering the court or tribunal to proactively enforce civil debt on a creditor's (the person who the order is in favour of) behalf."
Baguley said a complainant can pursue collection of their debt through the District Court which does have the power to enforce orders made by the courts, tribunals and other authorities.
However, Renters United president Geordie Rogers says there are a lot of grey areas when it comes to where the various courts and tribunals intersect.
"It's difficult to understand the law around these kinds of situations works. There's not anything that compensates you or disincentivises people from committing (these kinds of things".
"It's a situation that's ripe for abuse."
Anna Nguyễn moved into a flat that Webby was posing as the owner of in 2020. Photo / Alex Burton
Rogers says one way to close the loophole Webby is exploiting is to have a single tribunal that deals with all these kinds of civil disputes, rather than the fragmented solution that's currently in place.
Another solution could be a licensing regime for people to check the record, history and legitimacy of the people they're about to rent a room or house from.
Nguyễn says not all of them who contacted her after her Facebook post made complaints or pursued the issue to the Disputes Tribunal.
One of those was Jackson Tomsett who lived in the same house in Karaka for a month before Webby's behaviour got the better of him and moved out when the first Covid lockdown was announced.
"She threw a hissy fit" when he told her he'd be moving out, then came home to find he was locked out and someone had already taken over his room.
He managed to get inside and started moving his things out but says Webby watched him the whole time and abused him at every step of the process calling him a "stupid labourer".
Tomsett says he didn't bother pursuing a police complaint or going to the courts to get his bond back because it wasn't worth it.
"I could have tried to get it back - but in the scheme of things $400 is a not a lot of money to never have to deal with her ever again.
"I'm just glad I got out before lockdown … I can't imagine being stuck in a house with her for months."
One of those who wasn't so lucky was recent arrival from the United Kingdom; teacher Peter Kelly and his partner who found a room on Trade Me and moved in during February 2020.
He says Webby made it clear tenants were not to be in the house between 10am and 4pm as she "needed it for work".
"During lockdown Judith restricted our access in the house. We were not allowed to use the shower when we wanted. We could not use the oven or the kitchen (even for drinking water) after 9am and Judith screamed and shouted at us for even making the slightest noise.
"As we were all foreigners to New Zealand we felt extremely anxious as we didn't have a support network in place."
Examples of the notes Judith Webby would leave flatmates, restricting parts of the house they could use while under the first Covid lockdown. Photo / Supplied
Kelly and his partner left the house at the end of level 4 lockdown and moved to a motel at the recommendation of the police - who he said apologised on behalf of New Zealand for Webby's behaviour.
They took her to the Disputes Tribunal in September and won because Webby - once again - was a no-show.
However, the abuse didn't stop there.
Webby threatened to email the Board of Trustees at the pair's school and made multiple fake Facebook profiles to harass them and slander them on community groups in their hometown.
"She even took the bloody pot plants."
The actual owner of the Karaka Bay property, Michelle Lambert, was gutted to find out what had been happening at her rental property.
"We were just appalled that she could be doing that to people under our roof," she says.
"She has a market, she was looking for people who weren't gonna stay for ever, a little bit vulnerable … I think she ... had a modus operandi."
Lambert met Webby shortly after she moved in and says she seemed mostly legitimate, but there were a few alarm bells.
"She supposedly had a heart attack two weeks in, then a divorce … she'd constantly be telling us these hard luck stories to excuse late or short rent."
A still taken from a video in 2020 where Webby threatens to take a former tenant to the Disputes Tribunal. Photo / Supplied.
"It wouldn't be major things, the rent would be a day or two late or she'd reverse the payment and put it back in again. Just little things that in the context of everything else make sense."
Things came to a head after Lambert became aware of the trail of immigrants and students Webby had had through the house and bullied into leaving.
Webby was living in the garage at the time in order to maximise the rental income from filling the rest of the rooms. She was also short on rent, so Lambert and her husband took that as an opportunity to evict her and then take her to the Tenancy Tribunal after she trashed the house.
"She stole everything that wasn't tied down, she even took the bloody pot plants."
The Lamberts are some of few the people jilted by Webby who actually receive money as a debt collection agency organised for $60 a week to be taken directly from her benefit.
"It's not really about the money, we just wanted her to look at that sixty bucks coming out every week and know it's penance for what she did."
"God only knows how many people she's done this too … She's got to be stopped."
