2023-04-06 18:39:01
UK Daily News with John Hare
How a well-heeled mother became Britain's most prolific shoplifter and raked in £500,000
Who is this prolific shoplifter?Charming, always impeccably dressed and often at the wheel of a large, glossy Mercedes, Nina Tiara was the very image of middle-class respectability.
She was a businesswoman, she'd insist, and a very successful one too, with a home in the South of France, and a fortune in (variously) gold jewellery, gold bars and land in India, courtesy of her Indian-born parents.
If she was often away from her £550,000 detached bungalow in a picturesque Wiltshire hamlet, neighbours had no reason to remark upon it. Now, of course, they know exactly why their well-heeled neighbour was rarely seen at home.
How did she pull it off?For, from 2015 to 2019, 53-year-old Tiara was working, effectively, as a professional shoplifter. It was an astonishing, six-day-a-week operation that saw her driving the length and breadth of Britain in order to scam High Street shops out of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
All together, investigators who finally brought Tiara's elaborate con to an end estimate the single mother's industrial-scale deception, which exploited a little-known loophole in the way retailers handle refunds for goods without a receipt, netted her more than half a million pounds — some of which police found stuffed under a mattress in envelopes when they arrested her in September 2019.
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