Unrepresented For the v Mr Frank, director — 2020

Miss Gracias brought a claim for unlawful deduction from wages, saying she was owed all the money due for work carried out under a contract of employment over a two-week period. She said she had responded to a Gumtree advert, exchanged emails with a person representing himself as Jason Matthew Frank of Re:Adapt Ltd, and received a contract of employment.

The tribunal accepted that Miss Gracias had responded to a job advertisement and corresponded with someone using the email address given in the reasons, but found that the information used in those communications was publicly available and could easily have been obtained by someone acting dishonestly. It also found that Re:Adapt Ltd had been dormant since August 2019, had never traded, and had never employed staff.

A central issue was the contract of employment. The tribunal noted that it carried a DocuSign identifier, but Mr Frank's checks showed that DocuSign had no record of the identifier and the process did not match the ordinary DocuSign process. In light of that, the tribunal concluded the document was not genuine.

Applying the balance of probabilities, the tribunal was not persuaded that any of the material relied on by the claimant had come from Mr Frank. The claim for unlawful deduction from wages was therefore not well founded and was dismissed.