Bieber ticket fraudster stole £31,000 from firm
Crook back in dock after targeting her employers
ACONVICTED fraudster who cheated Justin Bieber fans out of thousands of pounds by selling fake tickets has struck again – taking nearly £31,000 from her employers.
Zainab Pervaiz avoided prison by a ‘whisker’ in 2017 after admitting 16 counts of fraud and being sentenced to a suspended two-year jail term.
But Pervaiz, 29, of Swan Pool Grove, Shelfield, Walsall, appeared in court again last week.
Weeping as she sat in the dock at Birmingham Magistrates Court, Pervaiz admitted a charge of theft by employee.
She will be sentenced next month at Birmingham Crown Court which has higher sentencing powers.
The court was told she swindled £30,753 from Green Motion van hire in 2018 after she kept the company in the dark over her previous convictions.
Amy Bentley, prosecuting, said: “The defendant has 16 previous convictions for fraud. She applied for a job at Green Motion in 2017, they were not aware (of her convictions).
“She was entrusted to issue refunds. Using a card reading machine she made a series of dishonest refunds to a bank account in her mother’s name that she had day-to-day control of.”
Pervaiz’s representative, Abid Hussain, did not go into any personal mitigation during the hearing but asked she be granted unconditional bail.
Her previous scam involved selling fake concert tickets to Justin Bieber fans as well as setting up online listings for performances by Beyonce and Adele.
Between August 2015 and July 2016 Pervais defrauded victims out of £9,982. But it was feared many more people had not come forward and the ruse could have been worth up to £40,000.
She had used a PayPal account belonging to her then-girlfriend’s unsuspecting grandfather to take payment, and it was he who had to repay customers who complained about not receiving tickets.
Pervais, a once-aspiring England sportswoman, had previously worked as a paralegal for a solicitors’ firm before being sacked. Passing sentence in 2017, Judge Simon Drew QC told her a career in law was ‘almost certainly dead’ and concluded she had committed the offences to ‘enjoy certain luxuries in your life’.
He told her she “came within a whisker of imprisonment” but ruled it was in the “interest of justice” to suspend her jail sentence.