A man has become the third member of a scamming team to be sentenced for duping staff at a dozen Cumbrian businesses during an audacious £13,700 fraud.
Sonia Malhi, 40, directed a team of crooks who initially snatched card transactions receipts from craft shops and art galleries. These were then used by Malhi as she manually entered card numbers into machines at different businesses in west Cumbria, the Keswick area and Kendal, while partners in crime distracted staff.
That allowed the gang to splash out on expensive hotel rooms, £75 bottles of champagne and wrongly request sizeable refunds. All were later rounded up. Malhi was jailed for 20 months in February. Her 21-year-old daughter Tia was also later punished.
And, at Carlisle Crown Court today, male gang member Remi Jarratt, 34, became the third plotter to face the music. He pleaded guilty — like the females — to conspiracy to defraud having been, in the words of prosecutor Tim Evans, “a distractor at various places”.
Jarratt was said to have been on a “downward spiral” at the time following the death of his grandmother in late 2018. “He accepts responsibility for his part,” said his lawyer, Brendan O’Leary.
“He gets caught up in Miss Malhi’s enterprise and he played an active role.”
Passing sentence, Judge Nicholas Barker told Jarratt: “The gravity of this offence, and the seriousness of it, is the ease with which it can be committed and the ease by which the complainants, who are running businesses, can be duped.
“There is a level of trust upon anybody that when they attend and present their digital identities for the purpose of commerce, they are who they say they are.”
Jarratt, of Oscroft Road, Cheetham Hill, Manchester, received a six-month jail term which was suspended for two years after the judge concluded he presented a “real prospect of rehabilitation”.
He must complete a rehabilitation requirement and a two-month electronically monitored nighttime curfew.
