Benef its cheat blows kisses as she gets 3 years
A WELFARE cheat lied about her health – including saying she was blind – to claim more than £1million of taxpayers’ money.
Christina Pomfrey, 65, carried out what is believed to have been one of the biggest benefit frauds over 15 years.
The shameless crook blew kisses towards the public gallery as she was jailed for three years and eight months at Manchester’s Minshull Street Crown Court yesterday.
She had admitted 34 charges including fraud, false accounting, possessing criminal property and using articles for fraud.
The court heard thricemarried Pomfrey exaggerated her multiple sclerosis, saying it took her up to ten minutes to walk a yard, was unable to wash or dress herself and needed carers 24 hours a day. Some of her claims were made with the address of a home she no longer lived in on Merseyside and she even used the name of her ex-husband’s first wife who died in 1979.
Over the years her claims included incapacity benefit, income support, disability living allowance, employment support allowance, council tax benefit, housing benefit and independent living payments.
Pomfrey, of Shaw, Oldham, was caught after investigators secretly filmed her driving her car, picking up her grandchildren from school, going for walks, visiting the supermarket and going to beauty salons.
She had been on a series of holidays, regularly ate out and stayed in hotels, and had various treatments at hair and beauty salons.
When arrested in December 2017, she told officers: ‘It’s a relief to be caught… it’s getting harder to maintain the fraud.’
But even after being bailed, she illegally claimed universal credit on the grounds that she was blind, could barely walk and was living in a women’s refuge.
The total cost of her fraud to the taxpayer was £1,010,090.66.
Judge Sophie McKone told her: ‘Your behaviour is staggeringly dishonest.’
Pomfrey’s daughter Aimee Brown, 34, of Runcorn, Cheshire, was given an 18month suspended sentence and 150 hours’ community service after she admitted money laundering, having banked £88,994 of her mother’s ill-gotten gains.