Police took over the investigation into Narinder Kaur in 2018. (Representative)
London:
An Indian-origin woman was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a court in south-west England on Tuesday after she was found guilty of defrauding retailers and other businesses of thousands of pounds.
Narinder Kaur, also known as Nina Tiara, 54, was previously found guilty in March 2023 of 26 counts of fraud, money laundering and obstruction of justice.
Prosecutors said she had shoplifted on an industrial scale, tricking stores into giving her money back for items she had never bought. She was convicted at Gloucestershire Crown Court of stealing from more than 1,000 stores in the UK.
“This ruling sends a clear message that West Mercia Police will take fraudsters seriously,” said Steve Tristram, Fraud Investigator at West Mercia Police’s Economic Crime Unit.
“Kaur is a calculating individual who has committed crimes across the country by dishonestly demanding refunds for items she had stolen. She showed no remorse for her actions and even thought she could get away with it by submitting false documents to the court with the intention of perverting the course of justice,” he said.
Police took over responsibility for investigating Kaur in 2018, working with the UK’s National Business Crime Solution, an organisation representing retailers, and other police forces in a multi-agency approach.
“We were able to investigate her criminal activities further and discovered fraudulent activity on her bank accounts, which allowed her to be brought to justice,” Tristram said.
Kaur was found to have traveled extensively around the country stealing goods from well-known stores and then falsely claiming reimbursement for the purchase price of those goods.
It is estimated that between July 2015 and September 2019, Kaur earned around £2,000 in refunds a week, equating to over half a million pounds in fraudulent refunds and stolen goods.
Knowing that she was being investigated for these violations, she allegedly set up a plan to defraud other companies using citizens' dishonestly obtained credit card information.
In March 2023, she was convicted at Gloucester Crown Court of fraud, possessing and transferring criminal property and perverting the course of justice.
At the time, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) West Midlands said that through working with police it was able to use financial records, shopping records, witness statements and CCTV footage which showed Kaur's criminal behaviour.
She was seen on CCTV entering stores, taking items from shelves and taking them to the till as if they had been purchased previously. Close examination of her receipts confirmed the pattern of purchases and refunds and that the same process seen on CCTV was repeated hundreds of times.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is published via a syndicated feed.)
