[Nicky91]

Feezan Choudhary, of Pollokshields, knew how to profit from his gift of the gab
The son of Pakistani immigrants is Britain's biggest ever bank transfer fraudster
In just two-and-a-half years he managed to preside over the theft of £113million
Choudhary created what police described as a 'Monday-Friday, 9-5 operation'

They called him 'The Voice', and Feezan Choudhary certainly knew how to profit from his gift of the gab.

By the age of 24, the son of Pakistani immigrants from Pollokshields, a diverse and relatively affluent neighbourhood of Glasgow, had already acquired all the trappings of turbo-fuelled wealth.

A natural show-off with a social media habit, he wasn't afraid to flaunt them, either.

There was, for example, the fleet of supercars, including a Bentley, a Range Rover, a Rolls-Royce and a lime-green Lamborghini. Plus the global property portfolio, which included rental flats in Glasgow and Motherwell along with swanky holiday residences in Dubai and Lahore.

On Instagram, where he posed as a hot-shot music producer, 6ft 2in Choudhary cut a remarkable figure, dripping with gold jewellery (including a £48,000 Rolex watch) as he posted images of luxury hotel rooms and trips to favoured stores, including Harrods, where he once spent £98,500 in a single visit and carried such large wads of cash that staff mistook him for a celebrity.

His vanity knew no bounds. During a well-chronicled trip to the Middle East, he even paid for a professional photoshoot in which he stood atop a sand-dune, in gold-rimmed sunglasses and baroque-patterned Versace trousers, accompanied by a tiger.

Another time, to celebrate his engagement, he hired Bollywood star Bilal Saeed to headline at a glittering bash in Lahore. A film crew was hired to document proceedings, using aerial cameras mounted on a drone to capture him slipping a diamond ring on the finger of his dazzling fiancee Ayesha Nadeem.

Guests were then ferried around in a fleet of Porsche Cayenne SUVs, kept spick and span by Choudhary's favourite team of car valeters who had been flown 8,000 miles from Glasgow to Pakistan for the weekend.

Observers of these (and other) preposterous displays of conspicuous consumption often wondered what was fuelling this lifestyle: the suspiciously young multi-millionaire did not, after all, boast any obvious source of legitimate wealth.

As it eventually transpired, they were right to smell a rat. For Feezan Hameed Choudhary was subsequently exposed as a criminal mastermind: Britain's biggest ever bank transfer fraudster. As the leader of an audacious gang, with members across the UK, in just two-and-a-half years he managed to preside over the theft of an astonishing £113million from 750 hapless victims.

Choudhary created what police later described as a 'Monday-Friday, 9-5 operation' which saw them working in well-orchestrated teams that were 'smashing victims all day, every day, and running their criminal business like a proper business'. At their height, they were stealing £2million a week.

Choudhary's career, which ended when he was jailed in 2016, offers a chilling insight into not just the slick modus operandi of Britain's growing army of financial scammers, but also the myriad failures of major banks and law-enforcement agencies that allow them to get away with it.

As yesterday's Mail revealed, transfer fraud has roughly doubled in the past year alone, with bank customers now losing up to £1million daily.

A mere 20 per cent of the stolen money is being recovered, while shocking figures from Which? show that just one in every 25 cases reported to Action Fraud, the police's under-resourced fraud and cyber-crime centre, are solved.

The true extent of this spiralling problem is likely to be even worse, since large numbers of victims are thought to be too embarrassed to report the crimes in the first place.

Against this sorry backdrop, two precious resources allowed Choudhary to build his ill-gotten fortune.

Firstly, he controlled a network of corrupt junior bank staff who were prepared to steal statements on his behalf. And secondly, he developed a priceless ability to sweet-talk the ordinary men and women named on those statements into revealing their internet banking details over the telephone.
Clever and highly articulate, Choudhary used a mixture of Scottish, Welsh and cut-glass English accents when calling victims, posing as a member of their bank's fraud department who had spotted suspicious activity on their accounts.

To convince them he was genuine, he'd quote information gleaned from their private bank statements, detailing recent transactions, account balances and even the name of their relationship manager at their local branch.

He'd originally obtained those statements via crooked employees at a range of high street banks, who were paid £250 for each one they passed to him. Three of them, who worked for Lloyds, were subsequently convicted.

Once Choudhary had gained a victim's trust – and with it the details required to access their accounts online – he'd keep them talking while a team of accomplices transferred large sums of money to a network of hundreds of UK accounts his gang controlled.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...customers.html

[Livia]

Filthy scumbag.

[arista]

[Livia]

There should be a sentence of life in prison for this. And heavy sentences for the scumbags who helped him.

[Nicky91]

he thought he could outsmart everyone, well he was wrong


agree with you Livia, he does deserve a long time in prison for this