Royal Mail greeted the joint operation, insisting which the quantity of vienne thievery within the postal service was negligible
Police disintegrate Royal Mail felony mafioso in [lbs sterling]30m cheque book fraud500 OFFICERS IN Sunrise RAIDS Snatch 35 SUSPECTS Adding up A POSTMAN BASED AT LONDON DEPOT.
In 1 vi nu of the biggest operations of its sort the officers, adding up Four hundred from inside the Met, raided addresses at sunrise. There were arrests in London, the Home Territories, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Luton. A postman was vi nu among 35 seized.
Detective Boss Examiner Keith Surtees mentioned: "We certainly have the whole chain, we certainly have them from down and up."
The group stole about 1,500 cheque books destined for addresses in NW11. They handled to stick around "beneath the radar" by employing merely two cheques out from each book at a period.
Mr Surtees mentioned the belief that cheque books are delivered by post had "permitted this fraud to happen".
He mentioned the general public "have to make up their own brains up about how bop nu financial vi cam tay institutions have to perform their corporation's". Crooks were aiming for the Royal Mail for livelihood, he added.
Today's raids are the culmination of a yearlong inspection codenamed Operation Bangor. Met officers smashed their way into 27 addresses in London, adding up Islington and Camden. There were raids in Croydon and Surrey.
One of several addresses focused was an original flat in a council block at the Dovehouse Mead estate in Barking. At 6am A dozen officers ran up the stairway within the block and smashed within the over the top door. Police arrested 100s of cheque books and charge cards in a sports pouch at an apartment in Tottenham. As officers smashed their way in, two men jumped out through the back window. Certainly one of them crumbled both ankles and legs.
Both men were captured.
The operation started in June last yr. Inspections indicated thieved cheques were being paid into 100s of bogus passwords. By Aug, Barnet police were receiving a usual of A dozen reports 1 day. Sufferers were reporting which cheques ranging from [lbs sterling]800 to [lbs sterling]1,200 were being cashed. There was also substantiation which other cheques were being thieved country wide whilst officers believe many individuals failed to note huge amounts of money vanishing from their bank passwords.
Doing work in alliance with Royal Mail detectives, police acknowledged one postman at the Golders Green depot who had been taking the cheque books. The man, together with 13 others, was witnessed for months within the run-up about the raids.
He provided the cheque books to regional networks. The cheques were so therefore deposited into 100s of passwords, with the cash extracted soon after either through ATMs or private withdrawal.
The group took up to [lbs gio xach sterling]5million exploiting this approach, with the passwords puffiness to [lbs sterling]30 mil through a few other performances, considered to have contained benefit fraud.
vienne.co. A spokesman mentioned: "The majority of our folks are scrupulously truthful and take self-importance in transmitting the mail in complete safety."
He added which "internal felony" accounted for just one correspondence out from every 250,000.