$2m jewellery fraudster: ‘At home I was the good lad with a part-time job’
REFORMED CONMAN REVEALS HOW HE PULLED OFF MAJOR HEIST
A REFORMED con artist has spoken about his double life as an international fraudster, and how he pulled off an elaborate $2m jewellery heist.
Saqib Mumtaz, 48, and his accomplices persuaded top-end Beverley Hills jewellers Bijan that the brother of the Sultan of Brunei was planning a lavish wedding and was in the market for precious stones.
The result was one of the most daring confidence tricks of the 90s, although Saqib, from Cheetham Hill, and his fellow fraudsters were eventually caught and jailed.
Now, he says he has turned over a new leaf and has spoken openly about how he and a group of friends stole millions of dollars worth of jewellery.
The scam involved telling the Beverley Hills-based jewellers the ‘prince’ wanted to purchase a selection of watches and necklaces to wear at a wedding.
Staff were completely taken in by the spiel, flew to London and handed over a bag of jewellery to the fraudsters, which was never seen again.
Saqib, in an interview with the Liverpool Echo, admits he enjoyed a millionaire lifestyle thanks to his scams, which began with credit card fraud. “I was living a double life - at home I was a good little Asian lad who was studying and working part-time.
“We would visit countries and be living the crazy life on credit cards. Mainly it would be the rich Arabs and film directors, anyone famous who had unlimited tonnes of money on American Express.”
Over the years, Saqib says, he and his friends progressed to bigger scams.
Speaking of the heist, he said: “We found out the Sultan of Brunei had been there (the jewellers) a few months before on a shopping spree, so I thought let’s give them a call. Before we did, we gained as much information as we could – it took weeks and when we rang the jewellers we said we are interested in a selection of jewellery.
“We never spoke about money, because when you’re rich, you don’t. We said we’re having a wedding in England and we wanted them to come here.
“We said we would arrange and pay for everything and asked could they bring a selection of jewellery.”
Saqib says conversations went back and forth and they even pretended to be on a flight to fool the jewellers.
He said: “We pretended we were on aeroplane on a satellite phone, but obviously we weren’t, we were in a kitchen in Manchester with an extractor hood on.”
On the day of the heist Saqib asked his friend, who he claims had no idea how much the bag of jewellery was worth, to dress up as a prince. He says he also hired a chauffeur and an SAS bodyguard to accompany his friend at the meeting with the jeweller’s representatives.
“I’d asked one of my best friends to be the (fake) prince. If you’re going to ask someone to do you a favour, something like that, that is going to be carrying millions of pounds of jewellery, it’s got to be someone you trust, you’re not just going to ask anyone.”
Saqib says once the ‘fake prince’ had made off with the bag their elaborate plan started to go awry.
He said: “What’s happened is, my mate (the prince) has got down the road in the limousine and that’s when his phone battery ran out. He borrowed the chauffeur’s phone and rang one of us on a personal number. That was a link.
“The next day I got him to catch a train to Leeds, where I got the bag off him. I said right listen, go home and be on your toes because you might get a knock on the door but you’re going to get looked after and that was it.
“And the next thing you know, he gets arrested.”
Saqib says that after the heist, the police were on to the gang and were ‘following them for weeks’.
Saqib was sentenced to threeand-a-half years in prison in 1997, after admitting two counts of conspiring to steal and two of obtaining property by deception.
Three other men, all from north Manchester, were convicted of connected offences.
Saqib says he now tries to mentor children and encourage them away from a life of crime. He added: “I do these interviews and if anything, if I can deter a kid from not going down that way then it’s worth me talking about it.”