Two Birmingham men sent down over holiday villas rent scam
Jul 7 2009 by Configuration Administrator, Birmingham Mail
TWO Birmingham men who ripped off holidaymakers who spent thousands to rent luxury Mediterranean villas are behind bars.
Victims paid up to £7,000 in advance in order to rent top-of-the-range holiday villas, many in Ibiza, but ended up losing their money in the Europe-wide internet-based fraud, the city’s crown court heard.
Maamar Belarif, 31, of Lea Road, Sparkhill, was jailed for two years and two months, and Searahj Abdrabba, 20, of St Oswald’s Road, Small Heath, was sentenced to 16 months in a young offenders’ institution after each admitting a charge of conspiracy to defraud.
Mr Recorder Malcolm Morse said: “It was a fraud on a substantial scale, with a degree of planning, care and sophistication, carried out with determination.”
He said that over about five months, just over £50,000, the benefits of the scam, had passed through accounts that the defendants had opened and had access to.
In return for making the accounts available, the defendants had received about £1,500 each. “Although the would-be holidaymakers paid their money, in no case did they get their holiday or their villa,” the judge said.
And he added: “The villas apparently existed, but were not at the lawful disposal of the people who created the fraud.”
John Mytton, prosecuting, said the swindle took place between January and July last year and that it involved the fraudsters moving the details of genuine villas, advertised for rental on the internet, onto their own websites.
They then substituted their own details for those of the owner, drawing up bogus rental contracts with customers.
Mr Mytton said that Belarif had used an assumed name during the scam and that there was evidence of close contact between the two defendants.
The judge ordered that money that was still in accounts that had been frozen should be paid out to the out-of-pocket victims.
After the hearing, DC Paul Beattie said as well as the UK, there were also victims in other countries, including France and Portugal.
