A fraud gang spent years paying off crooked bank staff at two major chains, postal workers, and hackers to con pensioners out of £1.2million.
The series of frauds, which occurred over a two year span from 2016 to 2018, were run by criminal mastermind Tosin Aminoritse, and his deputies Emmanuel Okafor and Matthew Abass.
They managed to bypass security checks by tailing bank staff from Natwest and Santander outside their place of work and bribing them with cash.
The crooked bank staff worked alongside the gang members to change details of customers, creating new joining accounts, authorising payments and cash withdrawals, meaning they could transfer thousands to Aminoritse’s cronies.
Some transfers saw transactions of over £100,000 appear in accounts of ‘mules’.
Hackers would sell card details to the group, allowing them to target new accounts.
Postal workers recruited by the gang were also able to steal bank details, and hand them over to Aminoritse.
The gang’s signature move involved a member posing as a bank customer, authorising a new joint account to be opened, where they could drain and withdraw cash from unsuspecting victims.
Aminoritse, the ringleader of the gang, has previous convictions for robbery, theft, false accounting, staging a fake robbery and using a stolen bank card.
He employed the help of Okafor and his school friend Abass to attempt to steal as much money as they could from pensioners, approaching staff outside banks in East London to rope them in to his scheme.
Prosecutor Dominic Hockley said: “In short this case concerns a series of conspiracies to defraud that took place between 2016 and 2018, in which fraudsters, these defendants and others, targeted a number of high-street banks to unlawfully access customer accounts and steal money.
“They recruited people that worked in the banks, they acted as insiders. They recruited people who pretended to be customers to open accounts, which they called strikers.
“And recruited third parties to receive money, who they called mules. This was a wholesale attack on the banking system to undermine the safeguarding put in place to protect customers’ money.”
