Convicted beauty queen guilty of padding her tips

A state jury deliberated for less than three hours before finding former state beauty queen Susan E. Shaw unlawfully padded the credit card bills of customers at a downtown Honolulu bar to increase her tips.

The jury found Shaw guilty Friday of one count each of fraudulent use of a credit card and computer fraud. She faces a maximum five-year prison term for each crime at sentencing in June.

Shaw, 44, is already serving a 20-year prison term for stealing the personal information of nearly two dozen people, using it to apply for credit cards and making hundreds of thousands of dollars of fraudulent charges. She was on furlough from that sentence when she committed her latest crimes.

Square Barrels owner Thomas Ray said he knew about Shaw’s criminal history when he hired her as a server in January 2017 on the recommendation of a personal friend.

He told the jury that over the 5-1/2 months Shaw worked at Square Barrels, she padded the credit card bills of 105 customers by entering on the bar’s computerized credit card charging system an amount higher than what the customers had authorized. That resulted in the customers getting overcharged $717.

Ray said he did an audit of all of the transactions Shaw handled after a complaint from a customer. The customer had written a $10 tip in her receipt for a $105 bill but was charged $125. Ray said he refunded the 105 customers the money they had been overcharged.

Shaw testified that she unintentionally entered wrong amounts on the bar’s computer. She said at times she was the bar’s only server for up to 60 customers at a time, taking their orders, serving them their food and drinks and cleaning up. She also told the jury she has a dry-eye condition that affects her vision and that in the dim light of the bar, she misread the numbers that customers had written on their credit card receipts.

When prosecutor Chris Van Marter asked her about a $5 tip she entered on a bill for which the customer had left the tip and total lines blank, Shaw said the customer signed two receipts. She said she kept the one on which the customer had written the $5 tip because the customer also had written on it a phone number.

Shaw pleaded guilty in 2011 to 140 counts of theft, identity theft, credit card theft, forgery, money laundering, unauthorized possession of personal confidential information and using a computer to commit her crimes. The state said Shaw used the money she stole to support a jet-setting lifestyle in which she had homes and different boyfriends in Kailua and California. Shaw is the 1992 Miss Hawaii International.