Gang jailed for £1.6m Black Friday swindle

CONMEN who swindled £1.6m in a ‘well-orchestrated’ Black Friday shopping scam have been jailed.

Javed Noor, Khurram Abbas, Mohammed Tariq Ansari and Mohammed Arfan Rasool ran a bogus business which claimed to sell heavily-discounted computers and games consoles.

Over the Black Friday weekend in 2014, more than 5,500 people bought products from the dodgy firm’s website. They were left out of pocket when the goods they had ordered never arrived.

Noor, Abbas, Ansari and Rasool, who were found guilty of fraud after a trial earlier this year, raked in £1.6m from the scam. Within days, £600,000 was transferred to overseas accounts.

They were able to set up the company after stealing identity documents and more than £335,000 from the trust fund of a 57-year-old man in October 2013.

The men took out a number of credit agreements with companies using the money and papers they had stolen, before ordering huge numbers of PlayStation and Xbox consoles, which increased the amount of credit available to them.

They then used the ‘positive credit’ they had built up to take over an existing electronics company.

They have now been sentenced at Manchester Crown Court.

Noor, 43, of Clarendon Road, Whalley Range, was jailed for nine years for two counts of conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to steal.

Abbas, 34, also of Clarendon Road, Whalley Range, was jailed for eight-and-a-half years for two counts of conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to steal.

Ansari, 44, of Grassmere Street, Longsight, was jailed for nine years for two counts of conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to steal.

Rasool, 33, of Clay Lane, Rochdale, was sentenced to seven-and-ahalf years in prison for two counts of conspiracy to defraud. Det Con Shaun Nicholls, of GMP’s fraud investigation team, said: “As technology becomes increasingly advanced, people think they can hide online.

“However, today’s result shows how committed we are to uncovering fraudulent behaviour and taking real action against it.”