back to article Woman with 15 IDs gets 7 years for multiple VAT fraud

A Bristol woman has been jailed for using a complex web of 15 different identities and companies to defraud the Revenue out of £118,000. 48-year-old Alison Reynolds was jailed for seven years yesterday for VAT fraud and police offences. Reynolds was found guilty of four charges of cheating the Public Revenue, one charge of …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Dabooka
    Coffee/keyboard

    That comment under the second picture....

    caused me to choke on my lunch! You owe me a new keyboard!

  2. The Fuzzy Wotnot
    Happy

    After all that effort she still only got £120,000?!

    All she had to do was get one dodgy ID, become a bigwig at RBS or Bar-Cap, then she'd have got millions for doing sweet FA!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      ermm except that

      Bar-Cap and Barclays was one of the few banks that was not bailed out or handed huge wads of cash.

      Hence Bob Diamonds stance that he and his bank had done nothing wrong, however the other industry chairmen were all cowering under the table, and will not be seen on TV for a while.

      1. Nev
        Thumb Down

        Wrong.

        Barclays got massive payouts from the us.gov bailout of AIG.

        Maybe not UK taxpayer money. But it sure was taxpayer money.

        1. Fogcat

          A title is required even for a reply

          I thought Barclays had a massive bailout from the middle east (Qatari and Abu Dhabi)

          http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article5053226.ece

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Grenade

        There's also an argument

        that Barclays benefitted indirectly from the environment that the subsidies to the other banks delivered, and so are just as liable.

        1. Marcus Aurelius
          Grenade

          Re: There's also an argument

          that Barclays benefitted indirectly from the environment that the subsidies to the other banks delivered, and so are just as liable.

          Investors expect to try and exploit situations, so Barclays can't be held liable for something that wasn't their problem. They went to the Middle East for their £6.5bn, not the UK, although they may find it hard to repay Gaddafi however much he lent them...

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: There's also an argument

            Barclays and others are also under scrutiny over the pricing of debt instruments since it would appear that some collusion was going on. Expect more from the EU on this in due course.

  3. Atonnis

    Her defence...

    If she'd been truly smart she'd have claimed to have multiple personalities at the court hearing. Just claim that each personality had to make their own way through the world.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      multiple personalities

      They might have got 7 years each...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "They might have got 7 years each..."

        "They" would have got more as it would have been a conspiracy.

  4. Leona A
    Thumb Up

    proves that

    us women CAN multi task :)

  5. Poor Coco
    Happy

    Ah, Verity CONNOR.

    I just HAD to read this to make sure it wasn’t our fine Ms. Stob!

  6. Nev
    FAIL

    £118,000 is peanuts.

    Why can't uk.gov go after some of the really big corporate offenders?

    1. SirTainleyBarking
      Black Helicopters

      Because they have very good accountants

      and Lawyers fed on raw meat and they can argue that they are practicing the legal tax Avoidance, rather than the illegal tax evasion.

      Its always the rubbish criminals that get caught first

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    On a philosophical note

    I think we are going to need multiple identities or at least ways to isolate various groups of relations from each other (say, the office doesn't need to know what kinky clubs you like, where the wife works, or what school the children attend, and vv) and since we increasingly must use our legal identities to identify ourselves everywhere that might very well mean multiple identities of sorts.

    But cases like this show (and most of us already know--cpt obvious) that it already is possible and doable to defraud and play havoc with others' identities. And I think the system needs to be made more resilient against that.

    Not by taking heavy machinery and using that to tie you ever more tighter to the one official identity you have, but by allowing for multiple identities but somehow making fakery harder and more unpalatable to perpetrate and easier to recover from. Make the device as hard to forge as you wish but do note that this means biometrics are out--you can't recover from successful forgery of fingerprints and dna and the like. And they /can/ be forged.

    This also means coming up with new concepts and new ways to use them. In this context, moving from identification disguised as authentication to authorization already counts as new. The current system is that crufty, yes. And therefore easily abusable by the enterprising identity abuser. Such as this enterprising woman. Well, I assume she's a she and hasn't faked that too.

    1. dssf

      New Concepts... in National ID

      In the case of the USA, If for a moment we can separate education/public benefits and State espionage/surveillance, and revamp the IRS to account for commercial and criminal elements, the IRS desperately needs to come up with some sort of 2-part identification and some new laws to impose severe sanctions upon those who defy the changes.

      I would propose that since the existing SSN (Social Security Number) scheme as an identification system for its purposes has been compromised by schools, lenders, employers, and others, that it be treated as compromised completely.

      There should be a assigned a biometrically-generated ID that is disclosed ONLY to the individual. The individual's existing and newly-assigned numbers might by necessity be kept combined in certain situations such as military, incerceration, and where armed/sworn civilians are charged with public safety.

      Consider this: In South Korea, by law, no one can have cellular or internet access without having a national ID number. I am not sure of the exact format, but if it is as I've seen in a film, it is a series of 6 digits hyphenated by 7 digits. From what I've read online, males' digits end odd, and females' even.

      https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Resident_registration_number

      For more countries, see:

      https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/National_identification_number

      In SK, in anything that requires an individual to supply the NID, males will also have a military service ID number, or an exemption to explain the lack of one. But, imagine if in the UK or USA or other places one could not surf or make mobile calls from one's own phone without supplying an NID.

      Some if not all one-time-use "credit" cards -- if you read the VERY VERY fine print -- require the purchaser's SSN. I am not sure if they would use as a substitute the user's or activating individual's SSN or accept some bogus entry.

      But, the new scheme of SSN-suffix needs to be something that isolates all known ID of a person and acts only as the individual's known-name and State benefits and insurer health benefits number to prevent con artists from depriving a person of his or her retirement or health benefits. Other things such as loans, employment, and so on should be left on the old number and ONLY in special cases associated with the new, very-private number.

      Feel free to expand on it for me!

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    alas I have no title other than my Earldom and an OBE...I'm an Earlobe.

    Well thats easily fixed. Say fraud is three years well she used fifteen aliases so that's three times fifteen years in the chokey.

    Should deter the rest.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's a joke, right?

    That's really Marilyn Manson, isn't it?

    1. User McUser

      @P Saunders

      Looks more like Marsha fro "Spaced" to me.

  10. Rob
    FAIL

    All those indentities...

    ... and she couldn't make at least one of them look pretty!

  11. Joe User

    Re: It's a joke, right?

    Nope, not Marilyn Manson. He/she/it would need the Siberian Husky look - one blue eye, one brown eye.

  12. Jim 59
    Stop

    Sentence

    7 years for £118,000 ? Rediculous. That's a month in prison for every £1400 pounds stolen. Kill a stranger in the street and you might get 4 years. Kill someone in your car and you will get community service. But steal from the crown now, don't you dare.

    Unless there was more to this story, it should have been 12 months max.

    1. Marcus Aurelius
      FAIL

      12 months would have been too little.

      Take MPs as an example. They got about 12-18 months for taking sums around £20,000. There's actually a sharp hike in sentencing terms at around £20k, so MPs did their best to get the sums they were found guilty of taking below this amount

  13. Ooo-wait-BUT!
    Paris Hilton

    @ Jim59

    yes... stealing from the crown is something VERY different and they NEVER EVER give up. Okay their records are utterly shocking and it would normally take about 5 years being on child benefit before thay noticed... but...

    Once a person has bypassed a perceived payment to the crown, that payment remains outstanding against that individual until paid, prisoned or post mortem'd.

    Fancy a stiff one?

  14. Alan Firminger

    She can do that so she could make more money legally

    The clever bit was the idea of theatre companies. They consume lots of stuff and have nothing material to show for it except ticket sales. Will told us where it goes, "into thin air."

  15. Dylan Fahey
    Paris Hilton

    VAT's a mean...

    VAT's a mean mother fu...

    Shut yo mouth,

    Hey, I'm just talkin' about VAT.

    For Paris, she thought I said vag, not vat.

  16. drfreak
    Terminator

    Wow.

    Forget facial recognition. One look at those creepy eyes in all the pictures and a trained monkey could see the connection.

  17. Winkypop Silver badge

    But....

    ....did she buy 7 of those (now defunct) ID Cards?

    No.

    She's obviously a 'bit' clever then.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like