A FORMER victim of a TV psychic who left a trail of debts in the North-East says “justice has been done” after the serial fraudster was finally jailed.

Sylvia Marquiss, who was given a three-month suspended sentence for fraud after appearing at Teesside Crown Court in 2013, appeared at Truro Crown Court, in Cornwall, last week where she admitted another four counts of fraud, from 2014 and 2015, which occurred around the country.

The court heard that Marquiss, aged 58, now from Truro, lied to a friend about having eye cancer to borrow £3,000 and failed to pay £8,000 in rent after moving into a luxury home in Cornwall and claiming she needed a triple heart bypass.

Jailed her for two and a half years, Judge Christopher Harvey Clark QC told her: "You are a heartless rogue and this time you will receive your comeuppance."

In 2013, Marquiss – also known as Jools Marquiss, Sylvia Mitchell, Izzy Mitchell and Fran Willows – disappeared from Shildon, in County Durham, leaving several debts behind, including £254 to a newsagents and £1,000 to Kevin Adamson, who runs a small gardening business, Four Seasons Gardening Services.

She also has convictions for handling and using stolen cheques and stealing from her employer in the 1980s and was convicted in 2008 of swindling thousands of pounds from a vulnerable friend after pretending to be dying of cancer.

Mr Adamson, who was owed the money from three days' work in the garden of her property in Cedar Grove, described his elation at seeing Marquiss – who regularly appeared on satellite TV show Psychic First – finally receiving a jail sentence.

He said: “If she had robbed a bank of £1,000, then she would have been locked up, but because it was someone who was struggling and working class, she got nothing.

“I worked that month for nothing because I still had to pay for all the materials and I wanted to keep my name good.

“We had just had a really bad winter so I made no money for about four months and I was just getting back into the swing of things in the Spring, so that was the last thing I needed.

"She just picked my name at random in the Yellow Pages and never had any intention of paying me."

Mr Adamson said that the ordeal had affected him mentally and had "left a nasty taste in my mouth".

He added: “I hate the fact that someone was laughing at me.

“I was elated to see she had been jailed, it felt like winning the lottery. She has made so many lives a misery.

“She is a serial fraudster and has made a living out of it all her life.

“She really is the worst of the worst.

“If she had been jailed the first time then these people in Cornwall wouldn’t have had to go through this.

“At least this judge has finally said “you need to be punished”."