Of course you can include a clause in a loan contract (yes, loans are also contractual relationships) obliging the borrower to use the borrowed amount for a particular purpose. Such clauses are not at all uncommon in commercial transactions and, in the vast majority of cases, enforced by courts. That’s the private law side of things.
As for the criminal law side of things, the assessment obvioulsy varies by jurisdiction. Most jurisdictions, though, include a criminal offence (called fraud or something else) which captures situations whereby someone intentionally makes false reprrsentations to make someone else part of their property. Whether the facts of the OP’s case give rise to criminal liability under such offences, we do not know, but it’s not at all implausible to suppose, for the sake of this discussion, that they do.
£1530 = roughly $2275, not $3060. Wow, I just saved you $785! Any chance you could lend it to me? I swear I’ll go to the ATM and pay you back as soon as I get my fingers unstuck from this train door.
I certainly wouldn’t be making a formal complaint to the wallopers. They’d laugh you right out of the station and you’d be the butt of their ‘in’ jokes forever.
“Hey Joe, remember that time that bloke Dunmurry wanted to press charges?” as they both roll on the floor laughing their arses off.
I’m guessing that the OP’s initial encounter took place in Northern Ireland, which does use pounds sterling. Same-day train tickets from Belfast to Dublin are around £30, so that part of the OP at least makes sense (but is the last part that does).
Yes, but you can’t just make up that clause after the fact. The OP may have relied on the con artist’s representations, but that does not mean that the con artist is required to use the loan for the purposes he asked for it for.
Jim: Can I borrow $30 for a train ticket? I’ll pay you back double next week.
Bob: Sure.
We have an oral contract between Jim and Bob. What are the terms of that contract? Does the contract include the requirement that Jim use the $30 for a train ticket? I would argue that it does. That clause hasn’t been added after the fact; it was included in the initial offer to contract.
I’m sure there’s loads of law on what sorts of requirements require written contracts to be binding, but I don’t know what they are in that (or any) jurisdiction. If I were deciding this case based on my understanding of the law, I would say that Bob has breached the contract if he didn’t buy a train ticket. And that he’s committed fraud if he never intended to buy a train ticket.
