Insurer lashes out at ‘outrageous scale’ of fraud as it revealed successful fight against 46 claimants whose party bus collided with a Ford Fiesta. When a Ford Fiesta collided with a double-decker party bus packed with revellers on a roundabout in Crewe it could have been a very nasty accident. Luckily the Fiesta was travelling […]
Category: Other Fraud News
Fraudsters behind £100k LFC ticket scam jailed
Craig O’Donohue, 29, and Paul Murgatroyd, 28, duped hundreds of fans who paid over the odds to watch the team play at Anfield. Two crooks who plotted a £100,000 scam to forge Liverpool FC tickets have been jailed for a total of seven-and-a-half-years. Craig O’Donohue, 29, and Paul Murgatroyd, 28, duped hundreds of fans who […]
Loneliness and the risk of fraudulent mail
It was the number of letters which her aunt was receiving that first made Penny Eggebrecht suspicious. That and the fact her aunt was getting through a chequebook almost every week sending money in response. The letters were from overseas lottery companies offering cash prizes but requesting payments each time. It was a scam but […]
Sim swap gives fraudsters access to your mobile phone
There’s a new, little-known scam designed to empty your bank account, as one Vodafone customer found to her cost. When Emma Franks’ mobile phone stopped working she assumed there was a technical problem and called her provider, Vodafone. To her surprise she was told that her sim card had been changed. She was promised the […]
Hacker gets 30 years in prison
Russian national pleads guilty in global hacking scheme Russian Hacker Vladimir Drinkman faces 30 years sentence after pleading guilty to hacking NASDAQ, stealing 160 million credit cards. Vladimir Drinkman, a 34 year old Russian hacker has pleaded guilty in US Federal Court for his role in hacking NASDAQ, JCPenny, 7 Eleven, Dow Jones, JetBlue and […]
150 complaints after Bestival ticket fraud
Police have made a new appeal for people to come forward if they believe they were potential victims of a ticket fraud for the Bestival music event. More than 60 complaints have so far been made about tickets which were paid for but not received for the festival on the Isle of Wight. Ben Hyland-Ward, […]
Fake UK passports for sale
Custom-made fake UK passports designed to fool border security are on sale for £2,000 on the ‘dark web’, a Courier investigation has discovered. The Home Office has launched a probe after we highlighted the site which also claims to enter the buyer’s details into the official UK Passport database. Within minutes of logging on to […]
Head of a car fraud empire jailed
The head of an ‘empire’ that ran a large-scale scam involving hire cars and speeding fines has been jailed. Jason Brown, 44, of Styal Road, Cheadle, was sentenced to five years and two months prison after admitting perverting the course of justice and conspiracy to commit fraud at Manchester Crown Court. He was one of […]
Nottingham ‘boiler room’ scam gang made £3m
A “callous” gang that made £3m selling shares in fake companies bought luxury cars and holidays, police said. They ran the so-called “boiler room” scam from Majorca to call potential UK investors, City of London Police said. More than 100 people, many elderly or vulnerable, were conned, with one man handing over £74,000, the force […]
How I lost £74,000 to boiler room fraudsters
A pensioner couple have been left with a “frugal” income after losing the bulk of their life savings to a boiler room scam. Peter Hodgson, 78, was duped out of £74,000 by highly convincing fraudsters who sold him diamonds as investments at highly inflated prices. “I should have smelt a rat but they seemed so […]
Drive to stop investment fraud across the capital
A London-wide clamp down on suspected investment frauds operating out of some of the capital’s most iconic buildings in the heart of the UK’s main financial districts has been running throughout the day. City of London Police, City of London Corporation Trading Standards and Metropolitan Police visited 25 office premises in the Square Mile, Canary […]
Boiler room fraud gang made £1.5million
A fraud gang duped investors into buying diamonds for twenty times their value before using the £1.5m profit to fund lavish shopping sprees in Selfridges, Louis Vuitton and Harrods, a court has heard. Victims were allegedly lured into the ‘boiler room’ scam by ‘persistent and persuasive’ salesmen who told them the limited coloured stones would […]
Dating fraud increases by 33%
Online dating fraud has increased by a third in the last year at a cost of millions of pounds to the UK public, new figures show. The figures from the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) show a 33% increase in online dating fraud cases last year compared with 2013, with the cost up from £24.5 […]
Hill Dickinson and Europcar disrupt staged accident
Hill Dickinson’s Counter Fraud Group and Europcar, the car hire services company, have successfully disrupted the activities of a staged accident fraudster. Following a court case centred on a staged collision between a family’s vehicle and a car hired from Europcar, Hill Dickinson’s fraud arm was able to identify suspicious activity carried out by Mark […]
Ex-worker jailed for £29k fraud on phones
A former call centre worker who cost Vodafone nearly £29,000 in new phones and iPads has been jailed for a year. Belfast Crown Court Judge Gordon Kerr QC told 25-year-old David Parry he was a repeat offender, whose motivation in defrauding his employers was solely for profit and as a result was regarded as a […]
Crash for cash incidents at record
“Crash for cash” insurance scams have continued to rise to a record level, according to one of the UK’s biggest motor insurers. These incidents involve an induced crash by criminal gangs in order to claim compensation for whiplash. Aviva said there had been a 21% rise in this organised fraud so far this year, compared […]
SFO starts Tesco criminal investigation
The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is carrying out a criminal investigation into accounting irregularities at supermarket giant Tesco. Tesco says it has been “co-operating fully” with the SFO. Last week, the supermarket announced that its profits had been overstated by £263m, up from an initial estimate, made last month, of £250m. The inflated profit figure […]
Conman pretended to be in coma for two years
A man who pretended to be so ill that he would often fall into a coma has been caught out after he was filmed walking in and out of Tesco and going on family holidays. Alan Knight, 47, of Swansea, South Wales, pretended to be a paraplegic whose condition was so bad he would frequently […]
How to spot an investment scam
You may think that you’d be wise to a scam, but smooth-talking fraudsters are using techniques that leave more and more people at risk. It’s estimated that around £1.2billion a year is now lost through investment fraud – that’s cash duped from the savings of others, which is never recovered. The average loss amounts to […]
Kmart shops hit by payment card hack attack
Cash registers at 1,200 Kmart stores were infected with malware that scooped up payment card numbers for over a month, reports the retailer. In a statement, Kmart said the security breach was discovered on 9 October and that the malware had been operating since early September. An initial investigation suggests the cyber-thieves stole credit and […]