Con artist who claimed she lost husband in blaze is jailed for four years
A WOMAN who posed as a Grenfell Tower survivor and falsely claimed to have lost her husband in the blaze was jailed for four and a half years yesterday.
Joyce Msokeri travelled 14 miles from her home to the tower block and convinced charity workers that she had survived the inferno.
She feigned trauma to obtain handouts of £19,000 cash, food, clothing, three mobile phones and free stays at a Hilton hotel. The 47- year- old would have received £203,000 in handouts if she had not been caught.
Msokeri told volunteers her husband and sister-in-law both died. In the chaotic aftermath of the fire charity workers assumed all those who approached them were genuine. And when Msokeri kept giving them different numbers for the flat where she was supposed to have lived, they put her apparent forgetfulness down to trauma.
At one point she said she lived in a 17th floor flat. In fact, it was home to Mohammed Hakim who lost his parents and three siblings. Mr Hakim, who was out on the night of the fire, said he was sickened by Msokeri’s attempts to ‘claim from the dead’.
In a statement read to the Old Bailey he said: ‘I have lost my entire family. This has just added to the pain. I am disgusted that any human being could stoop so low.’ Msokeri exploited the confusion that followed the disaster to obtain cash and other handouts at the Westway Centre, where volunteers were helping survivors. She used the money to pamper herself with a new hairstyle, beauty treatments and handbags.
She helped herself to so many clothes from help centres that she ran out of space in her room at the Hilton and piled up ten full suitcases in the concierge’s room. When police became suspicious she said her husband had been miraculously found in a cave in Margate, Kent.
Msokeri, who came up with the scam to pay debts of £15,000, is a divorcee who lives on her own in Sutton, south London. She was convicted last month of three counts of fraud and one of possessing a false document.
Sentencing her yesterday Judge Michael Grieve QC said: ‘These are callous and contemptible, indeed disgusting, offences. Your greed was insatiable.’
Msokeri was sentenced via video link after claiming she was too ill to attend court.
She was in a wheelchair – even though there was no medical reason why she needed it.