10:07am Tuesday 22nd July 2008
A LEADING member of a 'crash for cash' gang who made up to £500,000 claiming for staged car accidents has been locked up for 40 months.
Razi Kreedy, 32, of no fixed address, and his team invented up to 57 accidents involving high-value cars, claiming thousands for staged crashes in cars which had already been written off.
Earlier two brothers, 26-year-old Duab Albadri, of Cotton Avenue, Acton and Lafy Al Dafhery, 34, of Perry Avenue, Acton, admitted conspiracy to defraud on the same charges.
Albadri was jailed for three years and four months, while Al Dafhery was given an 18-month community notice.
Four other men, including Khaled Atek Alfadli, 30, of Cranfield Drive, Colindale , and Ahmed Rahim, 29, of Glenwood Grove, Kingsbury, were given six month suspended sentences.
The gang was busted after police carried out raids across Harrow in June 2006, during which they found a Volvo which had been involved in five of the claims.
Christopher Foulkes, prosecuting, said the plotters all had varying roles including chasing the claims and corresponding with the insurance companies using false details.
Mr Foulkes said the gang would use the same car - usually a write-off bought from a salvage yard - in multiple claims.
In one case a Volvo owned by the gang made a claim for a crash involving a BMW X5 on the A40 on August 10, 2005.
Records showed the same Volvo had been written-off three times before, and DVLA checks made when the owner of the BMW sold the car, showed the new keeper shared the same address and phone number as the owner of the Volvo.
Operation Phantom began in June 2005 when a computer alerted Norwich Union, the insurance firm, to anomalies in 15 accident claims.
They called specialist insurance fraud investigators, who discovered that claims were made for accidents in which the driver had supposedly written-off a car weeks after payment of the first month's premium.
Detectives seized bags of banking and insurance records from eight addresses, along with passports and driving licences in a variety of names.
Among vehicles found outside the properties were a Ferrari F355 convertible and two BMW X5 cars, bought with proceeds of insurance crime.
The 'crash for cash' scam costs the insurance industry £2billion a year and adds five per cent to the cost of insuring cars in the UK.
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.ealingtimes.co.uk