Solna Municipality Employee Sentenced for Embezzlement Linked to Mick Jagger Romance Scam

A woman employed by Solna municipality has been sentenced to three years in prison for embezzling over 18 million kronor, motivated by a belief that she was in a romantic relationship with someone impersonating Mick Jagger, the 82-year-old lead singer of The Rolling Stones.

The fraud began in 2018 when the woman connected with the impersonator through Instagram. Believing in the romantic connection, she transferred significant sums of money to help the fictitious Mick Jagger character with a supposed divorce. The embezzled funds totaled approximately 18.3 million kronor, moved via 179 transactions from 2019 to 2023, including transfers to countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Turkey, and Hong Kong.

To fund these transfers, she sold personal assets including her summer house for 2.5 million kronor, a car for 150,000 kronor, and a ring for 3,000 kronor. The majority of the funds—over 16 million kronor—were misappropriated from Solna municipality accounts, where she had worked for more than 30 years.

The court ruled that the woman abused the trust of her employer by redirecting municipality funds to her own accounts, resulting in significant financial damage. The sentencing took into account that she was dismissed from her position, which reduced the penalty from three and a half years to three years. However, her claims of being a victim of a romance scam were not accepted as mitigating circumstances.

An important detail uncovered during the proceedings was that the municipality's payment monitoring system function, which flags payments to private bank accounts, had been disabled. It remains unclear who deactivated this safety mechanism, facilitating the fraud.

Solna municipality has initiated a compensation claim and is working to improve internal controls to prevent similar cases in the future. While some of the stolen money has been secured, most remains untraceable.

The woman expressed regret and embarrassment, stating she was blinded by her belief in the fabricated romantic relationship.

This case exposes a complex criminal scheme where emotional manipulation through an online romance scam led to one of the largest municipal embezzlements in recent Swedish history.