Volunteer couple hit by flat fraudster
A COUPLE lost thousands of pounds to a tenant who sub-let their London flat while they were 6,000 miles away doing voluntary work in Africa.
Joanna Reid, 31, and her husband Alasdair, 30, were victims of one of the capital’s fastest-growing scams — in which fraudulent tenants impersonate their landlords in order to claim deposits and re-let homes at inflated rents.
The couple let their flat in Streatham Hill to Heidi Korn for a year, while they went to live in Uganda. The rent was set at £1,600-a-month.
But Korn, 48, a veterinary physiotherapist, attempted to sub-let the property to another couple for £1,800 a month. She was only caught by chance, when a contract bearing a forged signature was redirected to the Reids in Africa.
At Inner London crown court on Friday, Korn, from Ontario in Canada, was jailed for eight months for fraud.
Mrs Reid, a nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital, said: “We are pleased with the weight of the sentence. It was a very hurtful crime, as it felt very personal. This was a woman we trusted with our home and yet she defrauded us. We had to cut short a trip we had wanted to do for such a long time.”
Korn contacted the couple via the Gumtree website and moved into the £500,000 flat in September 2013. But just two months later she had fallen behind with her rent. As Mrs Reid took steps from overseas to evict her tenant, Korn advertised the flat online, claiming to be the legal owner.
She tricked two young professionals into paying a £1,800 deposit after sending them emails from a fake account. She also forged Mrs Reid’s signature on a new contract. She was only caught when the would-be tenants sent a paper copy of the contract to the address they were about to move into.
The letter was redirected to Mr Reid’s parents, who for warded it to t he shocked couple in Africa. They had to cut short their trip — Mrs Reid had been volunteering in hospitals and accountant Mr Reid had been helping to run a charity. Korn was arrested, and found guilty of fraud on May 22. The Reids are still owed £8,000 in unpaid rent.
Mrs Reid said they had been careful when choosing a tenant, doing credit and ID checks and using a property advice service to draw up a contract.
She added: “Still to this day we don’t know if it was all pre-planned, if there had been 20 other victims just like us. It’s frightening how easily it happened and we are lucky she was caught.” Sentencing Korn, Judge William Wood said: “Such crime is all too easy to commit and results in serious harm to many people. It i s g ro s sly di sh onest . It involves prolonged deception.”
After Korn’s conviction he ordered further police inquiries and uncovered 14 similar cases in the previous five months in Lambeth and Southwark.
He called for new measures to stamp out the scam: landlords should be made to provide prospective tenants with proof that they own the property, and photographic proof of identity.