Woman faked death in £136,000 insurance con
ABLACK Country mother who faked her death in Africa in a life insurance scam has been jailed for two-and-a-half years.
Arafa Nassib instructed her teenage son to lodge a £136,000 life insurance claim – but was rumbled when investigators found no trace of her grave.
When they searched the supposed site in Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania, they were told she was living in Canada.
Nassib’s 18-year-old son Adil Kasim was given a 12-month community order at Birmingham Crown Court after the pair, both of Lower Rushall Street, Walsall, admitted conspiracy to defraud Scottish Widows. The court heard Nassib, 48, racked up debts of £80,000 before deciding to travel to Zanzibar, where she was said to have been killed in a car crash last April.
But art and design student Kasim was arrested after submitting a “false but official-looking” death certificate said to have been issued by a hospital in Tanzania. The court was told Nassib, who came to Britain from Kenya as a refugee in 1998, had built up debts of £80,000 from purchases at furniture firms.
Prosecutor Jonathan Barker told the court that Nassib took out life insurance policies under a former name in 2013, naming her son as the beneficiary.
“On May 6, 2016, a claim was sent to Scottish Widows by her son,” he said. “Had the fraud been successful then the conspirators would have benefited to the sum of £136,530.”
The claim stated that Nassib had died from a severe head injury and was backed up by a death certificate dated April 14,2016.
Insurance investigators then travelled to Zanzibar and uncovered the truth.
Nassib had flown back to Birmingham on an Emirates flight and travelled on to Canada after speaking to her son on a mobile phone.
Passing sentence, Recorder William Edis QC told Nassib: “It was from beginning to end a pack of lies. This was an organised, sophisticated, carefully designed plan that came close to working. Had Tanzania not been flagged as a high-risk country for insurance fraud, you might have got away with it.”