Manchester bomb terror fraudster jailed
A FRAUDSTER who made up a daughter supposedly seriously injured in the Manchester Arena suicide bombing was yesterday branded ‘vile’ by a survivor.
Susan Pain, 51, exploited her job as director of an insurance brokerage on nearly £40,000 a year to make a series of fraudulent claims and bag £139,000.
To avoid suspicion, she put in claims under names of friends and relatives before pocketing the payouts as insurers fell for the scam.
But she was exposed and jailed for two years yesterday after pretending she had a daughter called Sophie among those injured in May last year at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, when suicide bomber Salman Abedi killed 22 people.
Two months after the carnage, Pain claimed £2,500 loss of earnings for when her ‘daughter had been in intensive care’.
She used her real name, hoping to get away with the con as she was known professionally by her former surname Raufer. In reality, Pain had no children, and an investigation was launched after the insurer was unable to trace a victim with her name. A review of claims she had processed was launched and multiple discrepancies were exposed.
After Pain was sentenced, Robby Potter, 48, who almost died in the attack condemned her as ‘vile’.
‘It’s unbelievable how low someone would go,’ he said.
Pain had worked at the Liverpool office of Money Medical Management since the age of 16 and continued using her old name Sue Raufer, a court heard. She oversaw a section providing insurance for medical professionals. In one case, she claimed her friend’s seven-year-old son had leukaemia. In another scam she claimed £6,800 as a ‘GP’ reimbursed over a son’s ski accident.
Yesterday Pain, of Kirkby, Merseyside, was sentenced for two counts of fraud at Liverpool Crown Court after pleading guilty before magistrates to a series of 31 fraudulent claims totalling £139,000.
Judge Alan Conrad, QC, told her: ‘I am sure all right-minded members of the public would be shocked you used a tragedy which shook the nation.’