Woman involved in £2m gold bar scam to repay elderly victim £1,600

A woman who took part in collecting almost £2m worth of gold bullion in a fraud targeting a pensioner has agreed to hand over £1,640 that will go to the victim.

Hafeeza Samreen, 35, settled a proceeds of crime action at the High Court in Edinburgh with the available amount to be confiscated in the sum of £1,640 with a compensation order made to transfer the funds to the victim.

Samreen is currently serving a 30-month jail sentence after earlier admitting to being involved in serious organised crime between May 31 and August 22, 2023.

She entered into an arrangement to collect £1,922,057 of bullion from a house at Biggar in South Lanarkshire and transport it to London for onward movement.

The judge who jailed Samreen and her accomplices told them: “This was a particularly nasty case of courier fraud, in which an 86-year-old widow was persuaded to part with her life savings to the value of almost pounds million.”

Lord Harrower said: “Ms Samreen you were chosen on the basis that, as a woman, you might more easily gain the complainer’s trust and confidence.”

The judge said: “I am not aware of any case of courier fraud in which financial harm on anything like this scale has been caused to a single individual.”

“The loss of such an astonishingly large sum of money would be difficult for anyone to bear. But given the age and vulnerability of the complainer, which are hardly unusual in offences of this type, the impact has been devastating,” he said.

Lord Harrower said: “It has affected her ability to meet everyday living costs. It will inevitably have impacted on her ability to make plans for herself, in the last years of her life, and to make provision for her family.”

The woman was contacted by a man claiming to be Garry Reid from the Financial Conduct Authority who warned her investments were unsafe and required to be converted into gold bars.

He claimed that they would be collected by couriers for storage in a secure vault while an investigation was under way. She was told for security reasons not to discuss it with anyone and that even the couriers would not know what they were collecting.

Lord Harrower said: “This was a sophisticated operation involving significant planning.”

Two others who were caught after a police operation to track down the criminals involved in the fraudulent hoax were jailed along with Samreen.

Her husband Umar Mohammed, 40, was sentenced to 45 months imprisonment and Sunil Theyath, 41, who directed Mohammed to commit an offence connected to serious organised crime was jailed for five years and three months.

Lord Harrower said that although Mohammed and Samreen worked under Theyath’s direction, they each played a significant role as couriers.

Theyath and Mohammed also face proceeds of crime actions brought against them by the Crown. A judge agreed to continue the case against Theyath for 12 weeks.

Lady Haldane ordered that the action against Mohammed should call again in court next week.