A senior council worker has been jailed after admitting a £73,000 scam where she sold mobile phones which were contracted to her work.

Nicola Williamson, 47, ordered state-of-the-art smartphones through her job at Aberdeen City Council then sold them online.

The senior analyst, who earned £35,000 a year and drove a company car, ran up huge debts by playing gambling games online.

Aberdeen Sheriff Court heard she spent her nights playing online bingo and slot machine games when she arrived home from work.

To pay off her losses, Williamson ordered the £440 phones and sold them on to phone recycling company Mazuma for half the price.

She carried on the scam for more than a year, ordering 196 phones before she was eventually rumbled by investigators at Vodaphone. The council launched its own investigation and she was reported to the police.

On Friday fiscal depute Kelly Mitchell told the court that the IT worker had been employed by the local authority for more than 28 years.

Ms Mitchell said she was in charge of ordering mobile phones for department staff.

She said: "This was done by logging on to the Vodaphone customer online system with a unique log in number and thereafter placing orders for mobile phones using an Aberdeen City Council account for billing.

"Vodpahone offered corporate customers, including the council, a credit fund which provided free hardware for customers.

"Orders placed through the credit fund did not generate an invoice.

"On June 15, 2012, the accused ordered two Samsung Galaxy S4 mobile phones from Vodaphone using the online system. The cost of these phones was £440 each.

"These were purchased using the accused's unique log in number and from the IP address registered to the council. She collected the phones from the reception and then took them home with her.

"On returning home she contacted Mazuma Mobile, which is a phone recycling company for which members of the public can sell their phones in exchange for cash, and agreed a price of £200 per phone."

The court heard that Williamson then repeated the process a further 194 times between June 15, 2012 and December 11, 2013.

She was caught by Vodaphone staff who noticed that phones contracted out to council workers in Aberdeen were being used all over the country.

And various IMEI identify numbers, which were specific to each mobile device, were noted on their system as being owned by Mazuma Mobile.

Aberdeen City Council launched an investigation as soon as they were alerted and traced the orders back to their senior analyst. The total value of the phones sold was £73,506.61.

The council suffered no financial loss but Williamson, of Aberdeen, earned £39, 843 through the scheme.

Defence lawyer Mike Monro said of his client: "In 2008 her life took a tumble in that her grandfather died.

"He lived next door to her. She had spent all her spare time with him and she really had a void to fill."

Mr Monro said it was "remarkable" for a woman of such intelligence to then have gone online and started gambling, and when her bank account was emptied, she failed to seek help.

He said: "She came up with this idea when she saw an advert for Mazuma and through a couple of old phones she sold to Mazuma before getting into this scheme or scam.

"She realised how easy it was to sell these phones because of the trust that she had. She didn't even have to cover her tracks because nobody was doing any checks."

Sheriff Graeme Buchanan described her actions as a "gross breach of trust" and said a prison sentence was inevitable.

He jailed Williamson, who previously admitted a charge of fraud, for a year.

Aberdeen City Council confirmed that Nicola Williamson had been sacked as a result of selling mobile phones that were contracted to the local authority.