Jail time for family after £40,000 crash for cash scheme

Four members of one family have been sentenced after carrying out a series of ‘crash for cash’ frauds and then claiming against fraudulent insurance policies.

Salah Mohammed, 35, and his three nephews all pleaded guilty to the charges and were sentenced on Friday 17 August 2018.

The investigation

City of London Police’s Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department (IFED) initially worked with insurer members to identify a series of suspected fraudulent claims involving staged and contrived vehicle collisions.

Various connections were made, linking the damage claims to the four members of the same family. Connections such as the bank card that was used to buy each insurance policy that was being claimed against.

That same bank card was used to open five separate policies with Service Insurance and Aviva. All had different, fake names and addresses.

IFED officers established that the bank card belonged to Abbas Moobe, 21, Mohammed’s nephew, and upon further investigation, uncovered two further policies that Moobe had incepted with other insurers.

After each of the policies were taken out, the four men set up fake crashes involving the insured vehicle.

Moobe would drive the target vehicle, with Mohammed and two of his other nephews, Rashid Ahmed, 27, and Abdullahi Bana, 23, in a separate car posing as a third party witness.

In total, they made five claims against the fraudulent policies, worth £41,210.60. In some of the claims, they were also provided with hire cars.

Sentencing

Mohammed was sentenced to six months in prison, to run consecutively with a nine-year sentence he was already serving for an unrelated crime.

Ahmed, from Hackney, was given 18 months in prison, Moobe was sentenced to 30 weeks in prison, suspended for 18 months, along with 170 hours of unpaid work.

Finally, Bana, of London, was sentenced to 24 weeks in prison suspended for 18 months and 150 hours of unpaid work.

“Often linked to wider criminality”

City of London Police’s detective constable Daryl Fryatt, who led the investigation for IFED, said: “These fraudsters tried to claim for thousands of pounds for a series of fake car crashes, but thanks to our investigation with support from the IFB, Service Insurance and Aviva, all they’ve ended up with is a criminal sentence.

“This investigation is a prime example of how IFED’s joint work with the insurance industry can prove invaluable when catching out insurance fraudsters.”

Jason Potter, head of Investigations at the Insurance Fraud Bureau (IFB), commented: “It’s clear from the fact that members of this gang are already serving prison sentences that these fraudsters are dangerous criminals with little regard for the rules.

”This case demonstrates that insurance fraud is often linked to wider criminality and it’s only by working closely with the insurance industry and police that we were able to stop these fraudsters in their tracks.

“Organised insurance fraud is a serious crime and it is imperative that we continue to focus our efforts on detecting and deterring this type of behaviour in order to stamp it out at the root.”