Basingstoke man jailed as part of huge fraud
He was part of an organised crime gang
Four people - including a man from Basingstoke - who pled guilty to defrauding Vodafone, EE, O2 and the Carphone Warehouse out of £429,304 have been jailed for a combined total of 11 years.
Operation Waterspout was a Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary investigation into an Organised Crime Group who were involved in high value commercial fraud. The fraudsters used stolen personal details of existing customers from all over England and Wales to take out new phone contracts and obtain expensive mobile phones and similar items such as Apple Watches and iPads.
Taofeeq Balogun, 30, of no fixed address in Basingstoke admitted his part in the fraud conspiracy to the value of £25,000. He has been jailed for three years.
Oluwadamilola Bolaji, 32, of Black Eagle Drive in Gravesend, Kent, admitted his part in the fraud conspiracy to the value of £145,000. He has been jailed for six years and three months.
Taiwo Agusto, 43, of Osbourne Road in Dartford, Kent admitted his part in the fraud conspiracy to the value of £3,000. He has been jailed for one year and nine months.
Carriba Johnson, 31, of Nelson Square in Southwark, London also admitted her part in the fraud conspiracy to the value of £2,500. She has been given a suspended sentence of 24 months imprisonment.
Abidemi Adegbite, 56, of Bennett Castle Lane in Dagenham, Essex, admitted his part in the fraud conspiracy to the value of £190,000 and is due to appear for sentencing at a later date.
Fake ID
Between the April 2019 and March 2020, as part of a nationwide fraud, Bolaji, Adegbite, Balogun, Agusto and Johnson stole mobile phone customers details, used fake ID and fake documents to impersonate those customers, and visited mobile phone stores to gain expensive mobile phones and other devices. This resulted in a loss of almost £430k for phone companies Vodafone, EE, O2 and the Carphone Warehouse.
The fraud series came to light after a Hampshire resident reported that between Friday 14 February 2020 and Wednesday 19 February 2020, four mobile phone accounts had been opened up in his name without his permission or knowledge. EE contracts had been taken out in the Fareham and Waterlooville Carphone Warehouse stores and phones where also taken out in O2 and Vodafone stores.
Hampshire Police contacted EE who found the fraud involving this resident’s details were part of a series of frauds which were all linked to 9 main handsets.
As part of the investigation, during searches of the group’s homes, many forged documents were seized; such as fake passports, bankcards, bank statements, utility bills and stolen driving licences.
Seized bank statements showed substantial amounts of money going through their accounts without a legitimate source of where it came from, and many of the seized items were shown to have been used in the fraud to obtain mobile phones, linking together by cell site data, sharing SIMS going into handsets, and also by bank transactions between themselves.
Five high value watches and over £40,000 in cash were also found and seized.
176 phone company customers had their details used for 602 fraud transactions, but did not experience any financial loss.