Woman jailed for role in £1 million fraud

A woman from Wolverhampton has been jailed for her part in a sophisticated £1 million mortgage fraud.

Former bank worker Sandeep Kaur, aged 23, of Duckhouse Road, faced money laundering and fraud charges alongside Mohammed Urfan Al Haq, 27, and Shazad Hussain Aslam, 27, from Birmingham.

The trio were sentenced at Birmingham Crown Court yesterday after their involvement in a scam to fraudulently obtain the title deeds to properties in the West Midlands and the north of England. Loans were taken out using the properties as security.

The loans were later cashed in and laundered into gold bullion. Using a false identity, Al Haq set up a bank account at the St Philip's Square branch of Nat West in Birmingham, into which the loans were paid.

Pretending to be Mohammed Zubair Khalid, he told the bank he had inherited property from his father, the court heard, and using this false identity, the defendants targeted homes in Birmingham, Coventry, Liverpool, Nottingham and Greater Manchester between February and June 2007.

A jury heard last month that Al Haq visited the properties posing as a prospective buyer. The defendants then submitted fraudulent documents to the Land Registry to obtain the title deeds and finance was raised on four separate properties.

The court heard yesterday that the plot netted the three a total of £1.177m, £800,000 of which has not been recovered. Al Haq, of no fixed abode, was sentenced to four years' in jail for conspiracy to defraud and two years for conspiracy to money launder, to run concurrently, after pleading guilty to both.

Aslam, of Alum Rock Road, and Kaur were both found guilty of conspiracy to defraud after a two-week trial in June.

They were sentenced to five years and four years respectively.

Sentencing, His Honour Judge Robert Juckes QC said: "This was a conspiracy to defraud of a truly sophisticated kind."