A woman who made more than half a million pounds by travelling throughout England and Wales shoplifting and then claiming refunds on the stolen goods has been jailed for 10 years.
Narinder Kaur, 54, made more than 1,000 raids on high street stores over a four-year period. When police searched her home in a Wiltshire village they found £150,000 in cash, as well as stolen goods she had not yet returned.
Passing sentence at Gloucester crown court on Tuesday, Judge Lawrie said Kaur was a “thoroughly dishonest individual” and described her operation as fraud on an “Olympian scale”.
Kaur, who also worked under 17 aliases, was found guilty of 26 counts of fraud, money laundering and perverting the course of justice.
Police said Kaur, from Cleverton, near Malmesbury, travelled extensively to steal from well-known stores and then dishonestly claimed refunds on the items she had taken. Between July 2015 and September 2019, it is estimated she netted thousands of refunds a week, equating to more than half a million pounds.
Steve Tristram, a fraud investigator from West Mercia police’s economic crime unit, said: “Kaur is a calculated individual who committed offences across the country, dishonestly claiming refunds on items she had stolen. She showed no remorse.
“She is, without doubt, the most dishonest person I’ve ever dealt with in 40 years of policing.”
Kaur visited stores such as Boots, House of Fraser, Monsoon and Homebase in towns and cities including Cardiff, Oxford, Winchester, Exeter and Bath.
She also attempted to defraud Wiltshire council of £7,400 by overpaying using stolen credit cards and then contacting the authority for a refund, claiming she had accidentally made a payment with too many zeros.
Tristram said she had run successful businesses but “I think what she found was that she could make a lot more money out of retail fraud”.
Kaur first came to Wiltshire police’s attention in 2016 for theft. A joint investigation took place between the Wiltshire and West Mercia forces in August 2020.
She carried on even while she knew she was being investigated, and in October 2020 was arrested when she attempted to fraudulently return items for a refund at a retail park in Swindon.
Despite being on court bail, the offences continued and Kaur was arrested in May 2021 for trying to return stolen items to Asda stores in Melksham and Swindon.
Giovanni D’Alessandro, a senior crown prosecutor from the Crown Prosecution Service West Midlands, said: “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.”
DI Tom Straker of Wiltshire police said: “As most of us went to work, Kaur carried out crime as her profession. She travelled up and down the country earning a living as a professional shoplifter and a prolific fraudster, and attempted to evade detection by using around 17 alias names.”