JUST when you thought human wickedness had plumbed absolute rock-bottom we read the case of Samantha Cookes (Echo, October 26) who systematically conned a loving, childless couple out of their savings in a surrogacy scam - an act the judge described as "a very cruel and sophisticated deception".

You have to wonder how anyone, especially a woman, could be so utterly heartless, cold-blooded, cruel and manipulative.

That, for one of the most despicable and unscrupulous tricks I have ever heard of, she then got let off with a suspended sentence, testifies - yet again - to the sheer ineptitude, irrelevance and vacuous unreality of so-called British justice.

Tony Kelly, Crook.