Woman made £500,000 getting refunds on items she stole from shops
A mum who stole hundreds and thousands of pounds by returning items she had stolen and collecting a refund has been convicted and is now facing ‘substantial’ jail time.
Narinder Kaur carried out the scam on an ‘industrial scale’, conning high street shops out of more than £500,000 by returning items she had never paid for in the first place.
Kaur - who also used the name Nina Tiara - made the fraud her ‘full-time career’, the Crown Prosecution said.
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Over a four-year period Kaur made more than 1,000 fake refund claims in stores across the UK, collecting cash for items she’d shoplifted.
Investigators from the police and CPS built a case against Kaur using financial data, retail records, witness evidence and CCTV which showed her pattern of offending.
She was seen on CCTV entering stores, taking items from the shelves and taking them to the tills as if they had been previously purchased.
In two searches of her home, police discovered around £150,000 in cash, hidden away, as well as stolen goods.
Kaur, from Cleverton in Wiltshire, was convicted of 26 counts including fraud, possessing and transferring criminal property and perverting the course of justice at a trial earlier this month.
An investigation into her finances showed that she was receiving thousands of pounds more than she had spent in shops including Debenhams and John Lewis.
The investigation revealed that Kaur received £60,787.09 in refunds from Boots despite only spending £5,172.73 at its stores.
She was also given £42,853.65 in refunds from Debenhams, although she had only spent £3,681.33.
She also defrauded TK Maxx of more than £14,500, the court heard.
Giovanni D’Alessandro, senior crown prosecutor at CPS West Midlands, said: "Kaur undertook fraud on a long-standing and wide-ranging manner.
"It was a very lucrative full-time job which demonstrably made her over half a million pounds over this period of offending.
"She went to extraordinary lengths to carry out her deceptions, seeking to find a way of defrauding a retailer and then travelling all over the country to replicate the fraud.
"She also changed her name legally and opened new bank accounts and credit cards in a second identity to avoid detection.
"She now righty faces a significant sentence for her crimes and the prosecution will look to recoup as many of her ill-gotten gains as the law allows."
Kaur will be sentenced at a later date, but has been warned to expect a ‘substantial’ jail term.
Claire Reid