A husband and wife have been jailed for a £18,000 health insurance fraud which spanned more than a decade.
The case was investigated by detectives from the City of London Police's Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department (IFED) after Simplyhealth uncovered the fraud.
Rehman Khan, 61 and Shagufta Khan, 56, of Greenleaf Way, Harrow made over £18,000 worth of fraudulent claims on their Simplyhealth policies between January 2002 and February 2012.
The pair were sentenced at the Old Bailey on Monday 27 June to 12 months' imprisonment, having just prior to sentencing paid back the full amount to SimplyHealth.
In January 2002, they both took out health cash plan policies with Simplyhealth and over the course of ten years, submitted 245 claims for treatment they claimed to have received at various medical and healthcare centres.
The fraud came to light in July 2013 when a routine audit of the Khans' accounts was carried out.
When some of the healthcare companies were contacted to check and confirm the invoices were correct, they said they had no record of the treatment the Khans claimed to have received.
After further checks were carried out on previous claims and invoices it soon became clear that both Rehman and Shagufta had been submitting fraudulent claims for the entire duration of the policies.
The case was referred to IFED detectives and Rehman and Shagufta were arrested by officers in January 2014.
Officers found that the pair were either altering invoices from genuine treatments they'd received in order to increase the values and get a bigger payout or that they had simply made up many of the claims and invoices.
Various documents, templates and fake invoices were found on computers that were seized from their home address and officers also found ‘PAID' stamps that they used to try and authenticate the invoices.
In total, 245 claims were identified as fraudulent, with payouts from the fraudulent claims totalling £18,827.
Rehman and Shagufta were charged in March 2015 with fraud by false representation to which they pleaded guilty before being sentenced at the Old Bailey as above.
Financial Investigator Simon Styles, from the Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department said:"Rehman and Shagufta carried out their fraud over a number of years and went to great lengths to try and avoid detection, going as far as buying stamps to try and give the invoices an air of authenticity.
"They were also claiming for relatively small amounts each time as they thought it would keep their criminality under the radar. They thought they would get away with it but they were caught out in the end and they now face the prospect of many months behind bars.
"This case should serve as a stark warning to anyone thinking about committing insurance fraud that we will investigate and if you're found to have acted criminally, then you could end up at court and facing a prison sentence."
