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May 11, 2014
Three men who travelled regularly from London to Birmingham to fleece unsuspecting pensioners out of thousands of pounds have been jailed for a total of 77 months.
Imran Miah, Hussain Abdirahman and Masum Uddin – all from Camden, London – set up camp in a B&B hotel room in Edgbaston, Birmingham, last year.
From there, they called hundreds of elderly people in the city posing as police fraud investigators – stealing a total of £11,000 from their bank accounts.
They convinced their victims – the oldest of whom was an 86-year-old woman from Sutton Coldfield – that their bank accounts had been hacked and that they needed to seize their cards and security details, including PIN numbers, to prevent further dodgy transactions.
They then booked an innocent taxi driver to collect the cards – after which the cardholders began to notice their life savings begin to dwindle in a string of withdrawals and pricey internet purchases.
Using this tactic, they first struck on September 3, when they emptied £1,200 from an 80-year-old man’s savings.
The next day, a 60-year-old woman who was visiting her mother-in-law in Sutton Coldfield, fell for the courier scam, losing £550. A pensioner from Quinton then lost £900 on 12 September after handing over his bank cards.
Between September 14 and 19, the fraudsters tricked residents in Harborne, Kings Norton, Kings Heath, Sutton Coldfield and Yardley, stealing thousands of pounds.
An 81-year-old woman from Harborne was worst hit, with £5,500 taken from in her account after the men made repeat ATM visits with her cards, and used them to make several purchases in London stores.
The scam was exposed by a quick-thinking taxi driver, who called police to report a suspicious booking where he had been asked to hand over a mystery package to a man in Holly Road, Edgbaston.
Officers arrived ahead of the agreed meeting time and lay in wait, catching Miah red-handed with bank cards taken from a 74-year-old man’s home.
They also found keys to a room at the Prince Hotel, where his co-conspirators Abdirahman and Uddin were later found – along with three mobile phones which records showed had been used to call hundreds of elderly residents living across Birmingham – including the nine victims.
Further investigations revealed they had been caught on CCTV making numerous trips between the capital and the second city, while Miah was caught on a bank’s security camera using one of their victim’s cards.
The trio initially tried to deny conspiracy to defraud, claiming they had only been in Birmingham to meet girls – but eventually admitted the offence at Birmingham Crown Court.
Abdirahman, aged 20, was jailed for 37 months after admitting conspiracy to defraud, with the judge noting his long record for robbery.
Miah, 18, and Uddin, 19, were jailed for 20 months each.
Det Insp Ben West welcomed the convictions.
They acted like ‘fraud tourists’ travelling from London on at least four occasions last September, staying for two or three days at a time, with the sole intention of conning elderly people.
Having panicked them with false claims of fraudulent activity on their accounts they advised calling their banks – but as they never hung up they jammed the phone line so victims were still unwittingly speaking to them rather than starting a fresh conversation with their bank.
They targeted elderly, vulnerable residents – the types of people they believed were more likely to fall for their scheme or that they could confuse into handing over bank details.
These are notable convictions against men who would undoubtedly have gone on to defraud many more people in the West Midlands had we not caught them in the act.
