Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Fraud gang fleeced elderly of £200,000
Crooks posing as police officers netted £5.3m in the past year
FURY and despair best describe my reaction to the letter I’ve received from an 88-year-old reader.
Fury because the poor woman describes how she is being tormented by a gang of crooks.
And despair because the letter didn’t give her contact details, so I can’t try to get her any help.
“I’ve had three different calls from so-called police officers but the last one really took the biscuit,” she wrote. “They told me there was a warrant out for my arrest for fraud.”
Sick threats like this are typical of the bogus police scam in which crooks coerce their victims into handing over their savings to help a supposed investigation by detectives.
There were 899 reports of the fraud last year, up from 860 in 2017, with £5.3million being reported stolen, compared to almost £8m the previous year.
DI Paul Carroll of the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, part of City of London Police, said most victims were in the 80-89 age range.
The latest batch of culprits has just been sentenced at Worcester crown court.
Mohammed Hadi, 34, from East London, and Rejwanul Islam, 26, from Dagenham, Essex, were each jailed for six years.
Mohammed Abdul Kashem, 28, of Camden, north London, got four years. Mohammed Nazeem Miah, 20, of Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, got 30 months. Idris Ali, 24, of Oldham, Greater Manchester, and Yarsir Afzal, 22, of Chipping Norton, received suspended sentences. All pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation.
Mohammed Nasir Miah, 24, of Chipping Norton, was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to 18 months’ jail, suspended.
Mohammed Nawaz Miah, 22, of Chipping Norton, pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice and fraud. He got three years.
Over three months they fleeced £200,000 from 50 people, the oldest being 96.
The victims were phoned by gang members posing as detectives and persuaded to withdraw savings and hand them to a “police” courier, which is why the scam is sometimes called courier fraud.
“These defendants targeted people who were elderly or vulnerable,” said DI Emma Wright of West Mercia Police.
“They were persistent and ruthless, sometimes keeping the victims on the phone for hours or subjecting them to many calls.
“Hundreds of calls were made, with only a handful of people needing to be convinced for the criminals to profit.”
The crime has also raised an uncomfortable statistic – it is largely perpetrated by people from ethnic minority communities.
“Why are we seeing young black, African, Asian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi men doing such things?” asked criminologist Dr Mohammed Qasim, visiting research fellow at Leeds Beckett University. “Their parents were by and large lawabiding, so what’s gone wrong for these kids in these numbers?”
He cited a combination of deprivation, lack of education and a desire for instant financial success: “Money is everything, money raises one’s street credibility.”
That could also apply to many of their white counterparts but some of them, said Dr Qasim, were more likely to have drug problems, making them incapable of these types of sophisticated crimes.
“You’ve got to be shrewd and smart to be successful in this fraud,” he pointed out.
“If you turn up at someone’s house and you look off your face you are not going to get much success.
“Statistics will tell you that white people are involved in substantial amounts of crime, but in terms of this one, I don’t think they are able to get away with it for as long.
“The Asian gangs are better at working collectively, which might be to do with the make-up of the community.
“Every day we are talking about this group. Something’s going wrong.”