Shoplifter made £500K from fraudulent refunds at shops in Oxford

Narinder Kaur, also known as Nina Tiara, 53, deceived retailers into refunding her for items that she never actually purchased.

Oxford was one of the areas that she targeted.

Ms Kaur has now been convicted of multiple counts of fraud and other offences across the country.

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She was found guilty in a trial that lasted four months at Gloucester Crown Court.

The prosecution proved that Ms Kaur defrauded the various retailers over a thousand times between July 2015 and February 2019.

In the period mentioned, she received £60,787.09 in refunds from Boots stores across the South West, despite having only spent £5,172.73 with the high street retailer during that same period.

Between 2018 and early 2019, she targeted the Homesense store in Oxford and other areas such as Bristol, Taunton and Winchester.

In Homesense, she claimed for £19,540.17 worth of goods yet she only spent £1,181.45 in the shops.

During two police searches of her home, around £150,000 in cash was found hidden away as well as stolen goods.

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The CPS was able to prove the case using financial data, retail records, witness evidence and CCTV which proved Kaur’s pattern of offending.

She was seen on CCTV entering stores, taking items from the shelves and taking them to the tills as if they had been previously purchased.

Close examination of her accounts confirmed the pattern of purchases and refunds and that the same process seen on the CCTV was being repeated on hundreds of occasions.

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The final part of her crime was to lie in the face of court proceedings, in order to mislead the court and try to affect the outcome.

Each lie she made to the courts was uncovered piece by piece and disproven so her perversion of justice could be uncovered.

Giovanni D’Alessandro of the CPS said: “Narinder Kaur undertook fraud on a long standing and wide-ranging manner.

''It was a very lucrative full-time job which demonstrably made her over half a million pounds over this period of offending.

“She went to extraordinary lengths to carry out her deceptions, seeking to find a way of defrauding a retailer and then travelling all over the country to replicate the fraud.

“She also changed her name legally and opened new bank accounts and credit cards in a second identity to avoid detection.

"She now righty faces a significant sentence for her crimes and the prosecution will look to recoup as many of her ill-gotten gains as the law allows.”