An elderly couple were conned out of half a million pounds by a ‘wicked’ banking scam that saw them manipulated by fraudsters and fleeced of their life savings.
Nine pensioners were among those targeted and then ‘controlled’ by organised criminals who tricked them out of £1.5 million.
One couple, in their 80s, lost £563,000 due to the scam orchestrated by Azeem Mohammed and had been saving the money to help support their grandson.
Serial conman Mohammed, 33, who orchestrated proceedings from his Salford apartment, has now been jailed for six years for his ‘leading role’ in the conspiracy.
At his sentencing hearing at Manchester Crown Court, details were revealed of the lengths Mohammed and his accomplices went to convince the victims they were fraud investigators from high-street banks.
The court heard of the enormous financial and psychological impact the offending had on their now fearful and mistrusting victims – who include a former bank manager – and whose lives and future plans have now been turned upside down.
An elderly couple, alone lost more than half a million pounds as part of the offending led by Mohammed.
The wife received a call on her landline from a man saying someone had tried to order an Amazon Parcel that was supposed to be delivered to Manchester for £600 and had tried to pay using her Barclays bank account.
The following day, she received a call from a man posing as a fraud investigator from the bank, who later put her onto a ‘colleague’ going by the name of Steven Cunningham, an identity that has now been linked to Mohammed.
After gaining her trust, he persuaded her to install an app called Team Viewer on her computer, which gave the scammers control of it, and access to her bank accounts and email address.
They told her she needed to buy a new iPhone and to send it to them at an address in Glasgow, which she did.
Packages then started arriving at their home, including one containing gold bars, which it was claimed were ‘ruses’ and which they were also instructed to forward on.
They opened three new bank accounts in her name which she did not have access to, and transferred the couple’s savings into them.
The victims had no idea what had happened until police turned up at their home in June last year.
Loans have since also been taken out in their name, with police and the courts having to intervene to have them cancelled. In total, they were defrauded of £563,000.
In a heartbreaking victim impact statement read to the court, the woman said: ‘Shocked is an understatement when I found out our life savings had been wiped out.
‘I cannot think of printable words to describe what has happened to us. We were saving for our grandson.
‘We lost our daughter three years ago to cancer and this was supposed to help his education.
‘Our spending has been curtailed. We don’t have the financial freedom we were supposed to have.’
The second victim, a widower in his late 70s, whose wife died in 2022, lost £40,000 after they contacted him posing as investigators from his bank Lloyds.
They again installed Team Viewer and took control of his computer for the day.
They also persuaded him to set up a new account and to make two ‘test’ transfers into them. He eventually became suspicious and alerted the authorities.
‘It’s very seriously affected me. I was really shocked when I suddenly clicked late that afternoon that I’d been done…I’d been scammed,’ he said.
‘I live on my own and I’m still coming to terms with the loss of my wife. And you don’t have somebody else around who you can say to ‘I’ve had this strange phone call, what d’you think of it?’
‘This has affected my basic confidence in dealing with people and dealing with third parties. It has really shaken me to the core how easily I was deceived and taken for a ride by these criminals.
‘I’ve got over the anger but I haven’t got over the shock, I haven’t got over the fear and I feel that it’s going to take a long time for me to get over this.’
One of the victims, an 84-year-old man who, along with his wife, lost £65,000, was a bank manager for 38 years and went through numerous checks with fraudsters, who used various phone numbers, a fake website and an address linked to his bank to convince him.
He spoke of the unrelenting pressure they put on him whilst on the phone to him and giving him instructions.
‘I’m not a technician, and I felt that I was being very harshly treated,’ he said.
‘I wasn’t being given any breaks, I wasn’t able to take food and I gradually was getting very worn down, very tired.’
‘I felt somewhat ashamed that I had been caught by this fraud,’ he added.
‘Particularly because of my experience in the bank, thirty-eight and a half years, and I felt that I should have been able to suss it out a little bit better.
I felt that I had let down…the bank, I had let down my family and I’d also very much let down myself.
‘I now really don’t trust anything, anybody or any financial transaction without re-checking it.
‘This is not a character that I have been in the past, but now I feel that it’s so relevant and important to do this and not to have trust again.’
Another couple lost £143,000 after the fraudsters tricked them into opening new accounts, including one where their money was converted into Euros.
‘For me, the sight of my wife transferring her savings to the fraudster believing that she was protecting her money will never leave me,’ the husband said.
‘I just feel that I’ve let her down by not seeing through the deception at the outset.
‘This crime cruelly took away our self-generated financial cover and until some funds started being recovered by the bank, we felt utterly bereft, and this very negative scenario continues to this day.’
The court heard another couple were seemingly being watched by the group, who are said to have used tracking and listening devices.
As they passed their branch of Lloyds in Gillingham, Kent, the man linked to Mohammed opened a line on the new iPhone they had been tricked into buying and screamed down the new iPhone ‘Don’t go into the bank!’
The wife said she was ‘furious’ and that the crime had also upset her children ‘enormously.’
Mohammed was caught after he ‘made a mistake’. In April 2021, he rang HSBC with the account and sort code of a suspected victim but gave his own name whilst apparently under the influence of booze or drugs.
After an investigation by the Dedicated Card and Payment Crime Unit, a nationwide unit policing unit which works with the banking industry, he was arrested near his flat in Wilburn Basin on Ordsall Lane, Ordsall.
A phone containing SIM cards of three numbers linked to the scam was found.
He pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to one count of conspiracy to commit fraud. He admitted in a basic of plea to defrauding nine victims over the course of three years – April 2021 to April 2024 – to the tune of £958,949.
The court was told the ‘wider conspiracy’ raked in more than £1.5m. Banks refunded some of the victims’ money, but not all.
Mohammed has a previous conviction for almost identical offending.
He was part of an ‘international organised crime gang that targeted elderly Scottish people’ in a ‘series of elaborate scams’ for which he was jailed in 2013.
On Thursday (October 31), Judge Suzanne Goddard KC sentenced him to six years and nine months.
She told him: ‘This is the most sophisticated and complex banking fraud against individuals I have seen in my 38 years in the criminal law.’
She said the impact on the victims had been ‘devastating’, adding: ‘It is telling they have found the stoicism to carry on with their lives and make the best of things, despite the enormous financial loss they have suffered.
‘It is perhaps a testament to the stoicism of people of their generation.’