Ghost broker sentenced
An insurance fraudster from London has been sentenced after he took out several fraudulent motor insurance policies whilst acting as a ‘ghost broker’ and then staged or invented collisions in order to submit fraudulent injury claims against the various policies.
Hojjat Nickhoo, of Derby Road, Enfield was sentenced to 21 months imprisonment, suspended for two years, at the Old Bailey after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud.
He was caught after a joint investigation by the City of London Police’s Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department (IFED) and the Insurance Fraud Bureau (IFB) linked together several disparate bogus claims back to the same person.
However, when officers spoke with some of the people Nickhoo incepted policies on behalf of, they either had no knowledge of the collisions that their cars had reportedly been involved with, or they explained how Nickhoo had persuaded and forced them to say the collisions had happened when they didn’t. In one particular instance, officers discovered that Nickhoo had even crashed a victim’s vehicle on purpose so he could then make the fraudulent injury claims.
Daryl Fryatt, detective constable from the Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department, who investigated the case said: ‘Nickhoo deliberately set out to defraud insurers in various ways – from acting as a ghost broker and taking out fraudulent policies for people who trusted him, to then making false injury claims for collisions that never happened or that he deliberately staged.’
Ben Fletcher, director of the IFB said: ‘The message is clear, if you are committing fraud then the risk of being caught and prosecuted is very real. Fraudsters face the prospect of heavy fines, a criminal record and imprisonment with potentially restricted access to financial services. It is simply not worth the risk.’
