14th
Apr 2015
An ex-tenant currently serving a prison sentence for sending fraudulent cheques from shut down bank accounts to her landlady, has received an extra 10 months sentence.
Earlier in April, the prisoner owned up to lying to the court in her previous case. She started up her own beautician’s business in Walsall in 2013 and then began her scam. Initially she forged a banker’s draft and sent a string of false emails, apparently from bank officials, stating that payments had been issued to her suppliers.
On top of this she regularly gave cheques from closed bank accounts to pay for her rented accommodation. Finally the landlord managed to evict her only after she had escalated the rent arrears to £7,500.
In May 2014 she was handed a three and a half year prison sentence after admitting to five counts of fraud. She asked the court for leniency by handing in a “supposed” receipt from her landlady, stating that she had in fact repaid most of the arrears.
The police were suspicious of her claims and undertook a further investigation and with the help of a calligraphy expert, found there were serious discrepancies between the landlady’s handwriting and the signature on the receipt.
DC Launa Rowley, the investigating officer of the Economic Crime Unit, was pleased with the additional sentence handed to the fraudster but was equally disdainful of the woman’s to abuse the legal process.
Rowley said: “Patel tried downplaying the scam throughout: she initially claimed the bounced cheques were innocent mistakes, not calculated attempts to steal large quantities of beauty products, and that she’d settled her rent arrears.
“However, I was in court alongside Patel’s landlady when her defence team produced the receipt…she told me she’d not written it and that her signature must have been forged.
“A handwriting expert concluded that the receipt was a fake and Patel begrudgingly admitted writing it herself.
"She is a habitual liar and has rightly been punished for trying to pull the wool over the judge’s eyes.”
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