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27
Nov
Harrogate woman jailed for five-year £150,000 benefits scam
A Harrogate woman has been jailed for 15 months after she embarked on a £150,000 benefit scam.
Eliza Assaly’s five-year fraud netted her nearly £147,000 in housing benefit, pension credits and attendance allowance between August 2017 and July 2022, York Crown Court heard.
She did so by claiming benefits in the name of her stepmother who wasn’t even living in the UK, said prosecutor Denise Fitzpatrick.
Assaly, 39, claimed over £60,000 in pension credits, more than £63,000 in housing benefit and £22,825 in attendance allowance by submitting false claim forms and impersonating her stepmother in phone calls to the benefits office.
Ms Fitzpatrick said that Assaly’s stepmother, who played no part in the fraud, had been making legitimate benefit claims when she lived in London.
However, when she left the UK in 2017, Assaly, who had been living with her, submitted false claim forms and made calls to the Department for Work & Pensions purporting to be her stepmother.
In September 2017, Assaly submitted a claims form for pension credits in her stepmother’s name, claiming she was single and habitually living in the UK. Payments were made to the stepmother’s Lloyds bank account but by then she had left the country and the money was transferred into Assaly’s own account.
Initially, Assaly had submitted legitimate claims on her stepmother’s behalf when she was a UK resident. However, temptation got the better of her and suddenly the pension-credit payments started “pinging” from her stepmother’s bank account into her own.
Scam claims
Ms Fitzpatrick said that between 2017 and 2021, Assaly’s stepmother would periodically return to the UK for brief periods, but when the claim forms were submitted, she was living abroad – alternately flying between England, Iran and Russia - and couldn’t possibly have made the claims or phone calls to the benefits office.
Assaly had initially made scam housing benefit claims in her stepmother’s name for the rent of a one-bedroom flat in London and gave the authorities a false telephone number for the landlord. This ruse netted her £60,674.
In June 2022, she told the pensions service that her relative had moved to Hookstone Way in Harrogate when she was not even in the country.
To corroborate her hoax claim, she provided Harrogate Borough Council with a false tenancy agreement for the address and gave a personal telephone number for a non-existent landlord as part of another fraudulent claim for housing benefit. She received £3,037 for the Harrogate property, where Assaly had been living since 2022, until her audacious plot unravelled three months later.
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Assaly had also made claims for attendance allowance - a non-means-tested weekly payment to help cover the costs of pensioners, particularly those in poor health - after her stepmother left the country in September 2017, again by purporting to be her.
She had signed the claim review forms in her stepmother’s name in March 2019 and May 2020 and the money was transferred from her stepmother’s account to Assaly’s.
Investigating officers discovered that Assaly’s account had been used while she was living in Harrogate and her stepmother was abroad. Assaly had been spending the money on “general household” goods.
After finally being rumbled, she was charged with seven counts of fraud and one count of supplying an article for use in fraud. She ultimately admitted the offences and appeared for sentence yesterday (November 26).
'Deriving fellow citizens'
Defence barrister Susannah Proctor said that Assaly - who was married, earned £42,000 a year and lived in a three-bedroom, £250,0000 semi-detached house in Harrogate - had been in a “very difficult” financial situation at the time of the fraud, having taken out hefty loans for fertility treatment following a series of miscarriages and to make payments on £12,000 of dental work.
Assaly, of Hookstone Way, was due to give birth to her first child in April next year following another round of IVF treatment and was “terrified” of going to prison.
Judge Sean Morris told her:
You are not an unintelligent woman (but) you have defrauded the estate out of £146,896 over a period of many years.
You forged your stepmother’s signature on documents, you pretended to be her on the phone, you produced a false picture of an address in Harrogate with a landlord that didn’t exist. That meant that all that money came to you.
Those who take money in this way are depriving their fellow citizens of that benefit and there has to be an element of deterring others from stealing from the state because it’s easy to commit these offences and very hard to bring them to court.
Mr Morris said although the 15-month jail sentence may seem “cheap to the public for that amount of money”, he had to “look at the offending in the round”.
Due to the government’s early-release scheme to free up spaces in Britain’s overcrowded prison estate, Assaly will spend less than half of that sentence behind bars before being released on licence.
However, she still faces financial-confiscation proceedings under the Proceeds of Crime Act which will determine how much she repays.
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