Tesco in £1.3m fake crash scam where delivery drivers bribed to stage accidents

Shahin Mouradi, 24, has been put behind bars for 15 months after he targeted Tesco drivers and persuaded them to take part in a major fraud scam which lost the supermarket thousands of pounds

A man has been jailed after taking part in an elaborate scam which persuades Tesco drivers to crash their vans and claim insurance.

Shahin Mouradi, 24, was one of dozens of fraudsters who duped the supermarket out of thousands of pounds. As part of the scam, delivery drivers were bribed to fake crashes and then contact insurers.

The drivers were told to claim payments which built to a staggering £1.3million against the supermarket. Mrs Justice Collins Rice sentenced Mouradi, a hotel worker, to 15 months in prison. She described the scheme as "organised crime" and said such scams can affect households across the country.

She further explained that the scam pushes up prices on supermarket shelves, resulting in the "cost of modern living being higher than it should be." In total, 27 people were hauled before the courts following a mammoth operation by the retail giant, which won damages and costs payments totalling almost £2million from fraudsters.

But Mouradi, who was ordered to pay a total of over £60,000, has also now been jailed for contempt of court after lying about his involvement and getting a more legally confident friend to impersonate him during a hearing in December 2020 in a bid to dodge justice.

The High Court heard the scam - described by lawyers as "the UK's largest ever civil motor fraud operation" - had focused on Tesco's delivery depot in Greenford, west London. Scammers targeted delivery van drivers, who were "bribed" to get involved in staging fake crashes with other cars, with fraudulent insurance claims then being made.

In total, Tesco received 32 separate claims, with 19 being "repudiated" without going to court and another 13 going before Judge Heather Baucher at Central London County Court over several weeks last year.
Having uncovered the frauds, Tesco countersued 27 individuals in the 13 cases, with Judge Baucher awarding the company over £650,000 in damages, as well as costs of £1.25million against those involved.

In one of her judgments on the case, she described it as "a fraud and conspiracy of unprecedented scale, which has engaged this court in five weeks of continuous Tesco litigation." In Mouradi's case, he had claimed compensation as the owner of a Mercedes which was involved in a crash with a Tesco van in Enfield Road, Brentford, west London, in October 2019.

As Tesco began to suspect the truth about the crash, Mouradi embarked on a campaign of dishonesty, enlisting a friend to impersonate him during a 2020 video link hearing in a bid to dodge justice. Mrs Justice Collins Rice said he had done so because he thought the man's "maturity, leadership, confidence and familiarity with legal issues" could help him get out of his predicament.

The man, claiming to be Mouradi, said he was unable to show his face on camera and instead conducted the hearing by voice alone as he falsely blamed others - including a respected law firm - for the fraudulent claim, which he said he knew nothing about.

But alarm bells were raised by an observer, who told the judge that the man speaking was not Shahin Mouradi, with a voice recognition expert later saying there was "extremely strong support" for a conclusion that it was not Mouradi who had spoken.

Mouradi continued to lie, insisting it was he who had spoken, and then lied again when he changed his story to say that, while he knew about the claim, he was not involved in the staged crash itself. He was ultimately found by Judge Baucher to have engaged in deceit and conspiracy in relation to the staged accident and ordered to pay Tesco £24,000 in compensation and another £37,500 towards its lawyers' bills.

Tesco then hauled him to the High Court, where he has now been jailed for 15 months for contempt of court in relation to his lies and his use of an impersonator. Sentencing him, the judge said Mouradi got mixed up in the sort of organised crime which "drives up prices in supermarkets, increases insurance premiums and makes the cost of modern living higher than it should be."

"Issuing a false compensation claim in the first place indicated a lack of honesty and a lack of respect for court proceedings," she said. "The impersonation itself was a flagrant and sustained deception of the court even without the subsequent lies about it on oath. This was a sustained course of lying on oath to the court, in pleadings and witness statements, and in oral evidence."

She said that, as his lies unravelled, instead of confessing, he had instead "doubled down and got deeper and deeper into untruth," embarking on a "persistent and escalating course of conduct of trying to conceal wrongdoing."

She concluded: "The minimum sentence I am able to pass on you, commensurate with the seriousness of the course of conduct and in order to restore public confidence in justice and deter others from following your shocking example, is a period of imprisonment of 15 months."

Tesco's lawyers said that the numerous claims against it could have resulted in compensation payments totalling around £1.3m being made if it had not uncovered the scam.