Aviva fraudsters receive custodial sentences

by Gill Montia

Story link: Aviva fraudsters receive custodial sentences

Three fraudsters who accessed customer information from Aviva and stole £638,000 have received custodial sentences from Southwark Crown Court.

The scam involved using personal details of Aviva directors obtained from Companies House to extract information about the directors’ life insurance policies from the insurer’s call centres in the UK and India.

The £638,000 was obtained by cashing in policies, with the money initially transferred to fraudulent bank accounts set-up in the directors’ names.

From there, the gang moved the money into business accounts in their own names.

The offences took place in 2006 and the following year Aviva was fined £1.26 million by the Financial Services Authority for poor controls that exposed policy holders to the risk of fraud.

The regulator said the group had “failed to undertake an adequate assessment of the financial crime risks which it faced (in particular the risk to information security), failed to assess whether its existing controls were adequate to manage these risks, and failed to implement adequate and effective procedures to address these risks”.

Gideon Komolafe and Simon Kogoro received sentences of four-and-a-half years and Wilton Clarke has been detained for 18 months.