Jailed gangsters’ car scam grinds to a halt ~ Debt Managements and Consolidation

A conman and his team swindled personal injury lawyers out of £150,000 by inventing car crashes and referring the 'injured clients' to them, the Daily Mail reports.

Irfan Manzoor, 35, who saw himself as a major player within the world of accident claims, was a fraudster who duped solicitors paying him for passing fake cases onto them.The Manchester-based scheme preyed on solicitors in order to pocket the referral fees at £600 each time. Manzoor concocted stories of car crashes and falls on pavements but the lawyers only realised when they tried to contact the 'injured clients' to prepare expensive litigation for them. The telephone numbers given to them would be simply diverted to his accomplices, who would then pretend they were either the claimants or the parties at fault. Once lawyers had handed over referral fees all contact with the firm would suddenly be severed. One member of Manzoor’s team used to be a General Medical Council investigations officer, who used his insider knowledge in order to create plausible doctors’ notes. had inside knowledge of the personal injury sector and was able to create doctors notes. Manzoor’s company, North West Claims Ltd, was based in a luxury £1,300 a month rented Manchester apartment in Beetham Tower, one of the tallest and most prestigious skyscrapers in Britain. At least 19 law firms fell victim to the scam, although the figure is probably in excess of that, as investigators believe other firms were conned but were too embarrassed to come forward. It was when Border Agency officials raided the company on April 2009 that the scam was exposed. As a result of the raid, 187 claim forms from solicitors were found along with 33 mobile phones and charts including documents on how to create false national insurance numbers. Over a five month period, £135,000 had been paid in and £131,000 withdrawn under the name of Lia Ali, one of Manzoor's aliases. A second account had £18,000 paid into it. Upon sentencing Manzoor, Judge Elgan Edwards QC said; “You played a significant role in this sophisticated, clever and also successful fraud. It was also dishonest and was dishonest from the start. You all knew what you were doing.”Detective Constable Martyn Cunningham, from Greater Manchester Police’s Economic Crime Unit, told the Daily Mail: “The full extent of the damage caused by the bogus enterprise is not known, as not all of the law firms affected have come forward.“Furthermore, we do not know how much time was wasted by solicitors working on these completely fictitious cases. Even though its sole purpose was to fraudulently make money, this company operated like a legitimate business. “The defendants each had their own roles and responsibilities. They each had extensive knowledge of the personal claims industry, which helped them completely exploit it.“ But this was a fraud that was large in scale, meticulously planned, deliberate in its intention, directly targeted at its victims and tenaciously executed to obtain maximum revenue. This was, at the heart of it, a case of organised crime.“ But it also has to be said that the vast majority of claims management companies are legitimate and genuine, and have a well-earned reputation with the solicitors and claimants they work with.” Last Friday Manzoor began a 30 month jail term after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud. He was also banned from being a company director for five years. The other members of the gang were also jailed after being convicted of conspiracy to defraud: Javaid Shah, 30, from Manchester, and jailed for 12 months; Amjad Hussain, 34, from Northern Moor, Manchester was given 12 months in jail; Safdar Ali, 33, from Belle Vue, Manchester was jailed for four years; Vahida Iqbal, 32, from Oldham was given two years; amd Kadija Ahmed, 21, from Heald Green was jailed for 15 months.
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