Couple sent down over £900,000 car insurance fraud A Kent-based couple were jailed after committing over £900,000 worth of car insurance fraud. Elina Jaksone, 36, from Latvia and Gagik Manucharyan, 40, from Cyprus were sent to prison by a judge for their role in ripping off customers with their fraudulent car insurance broker. They set up a brokerage that gave clients cheap insurance policies by using fake details that would reduce the premiums paid, typically by hundreds of pounds. In return they charged a £100 per client brokerage fee. Among the tricks they played on insurers was pretending to be their clients and producing fake driving records. As the details on the policies are false then they have been invalidated meaning those who took out insurance using their brokerage have been left without car insurance. The couple mainly attracted Eastern European clients who were not used to purchasing car insurance in the UK and might have had linguistic barriers to completing applications themselves. With the £920,000 they made out of the fraud they purchased a detached house in Westgate-on-Sea, Kent, for £365,000 and sent their children to a fee-paying school. They also went on luxury holidays in places like Mauritius, Jamaica, Japan and Mexico and had luxury Mercedes cars, one of which cost them £56,000. On top of their insurance fraud they also didn’t pay any tax, which HMRC calculated would have been £340,000. Their trial lasted seven weeks at Maidstone Crown Court, and they were convinced of insurance and benefit fraud. Over thirty of the drivers they’d ripped off by selling fraudulent policies too testified in the court. The benefit fraud consisted of Jaksone claiming £82,000 in tax and pension credits by pretending to be a single mother with multiple children. The couple tried to avoid jail by arguing that they’d miss their kids too much, but the judge said they’d brought that upon themselves by committing fraud. He argued that: ”In this country now and for some time, many honest taxpayers are struggling to make ends meet, pay their rent and mortgages and for some the idea of a holiday of any kind is beyond their dreams, let alone Mauritius and Jamaica.” Judge James O’Mahony gave them both extensive sentences, Manucharyan was sent down for five years and two months and Jaksone for five years. They will be deported upon release. They’ll also see their finances investigated and anything that came from the fraud taken from them. Their house has already been restrained. A HMRC director David Margee commented: ”Jaksone and Manucharyan cheated honest, law abiding people, spending their ill-gotten gains on a lifestyle that many of us can only dream of. They also cheated their customers by providing them with inadequate insurance policies.” It’s stories like this that make us especially thankful that the internet has largely eliminated traditional brokerages. Instead using sites like monkey you can compare policies from insurers using your own details then take out the policies directly with the insurer, knowing that no middleman is committing fraud. It’s not clear how many people have lost out due to their policies being invalidated from their fraud, but it’s likely to be in the thousands.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Jul 2013 06:03:20 +0000
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