A young Canadian woman caught smuggling $21 million worth of cocaine into Australia after posting selfies to Instagram has been sentenced to eight years behind bars.
24-year-old Melina Roberge pleaded guilty in New South Wales state district court to importing nearly 30 kilograms of cocaine on board a cruise ship docked in Sydney in August 2016.
As The Guardian reports, Roberge and her friend Isabelle Lagace had boasted about their international travels and shared snaps from the luxury cruiser on Instagram.
When they arrived in Australia, border security agents found 35 kilograms of the drug in the women’s cabin and 60kg in Andre Tamin’s cabin, a man Roberge called her “sugar daddy”.
During sentencing, Judge Kate Traill said Roberge had been “seduced by lifestyle and the opportunity to post glamorous Instagram photos from around the world”.
“It is a very sad indictment on her relative age group in society to seem to get self worth relative to posts on Instagram,” Judge Traill said.
She continued: “It is sad they seek to attain such a vacuous existence where how many likes they receive are their currency.
“This highlights the negative influence of social media on young women.”
Last November, Lagace, 30, was sentenced to at least four-and-a-half years in jail; Tamin, 60, has also pleaded guilty and will be sentenced in October.
Roberge was sentenced to a maximum eight years behind bars with a non-parole period of four years and nine months, The Sun reports.
