35 arrested in £20 million pound cheque fraud

Police have arrested 35 people across the UK in connection with a major investigation into multi-million pound cheque fraud.

The arrests were made following a series of dawn raids, involving around 400 police officers, at 36 addresses across London, Surrey, Kent, Cambridgeshire, West Midlands, West Yorkshire and Manchester.

The investigation, code named Operation Bangor, was launched in June 2004, after police received a number of reports from people in the Golders Green area of London, stating that large sums of money had been disappearing from their bank accounts. It was discovered that cheques for amounts ranging between £800 and £1200 were being cashed from chequebooks, which had never been received by the account holders.

By August last year, police were receiving around 12 reports per day of such crimes and the total number of reports received throughout the investigation amounts to nearly 1200 relating to 1500 chequebooks.

Police said that Royal Mail Corporate Security helped them to identify an employee allegedly involved in the case. Detectives then discovered that the cheques were being passed to a group of men, who did not work for Royal Mail, who fraudulently cashed them. It is alleged that up to 200 people would then place the money in a series of both legitimate and bogus bank accounts.

Police have estimated the scale of the fraud in Golders Green to be between £3 million and £5 million.

However, detectives tracking the accounts involved in the case found other cheques that were being sourced from elsewhere, accounting for around £20 million.

(KMcA/SP)