Career Shoplifter earned half a million

A WOMAN who shoplifted goods and then returned them for refunds, made more than £500,000 a court heard.

53-year-old Narinder Kaur, also known as Nina Tiara, travelled across the country to deceive shops, including John Lewis, TK Maxx, and Debenhams.

The shoplifter made it her “full-time career” to steal from high-street stores and then return the stolen goods for refunds. She allegedly committed thousands of offenses between 2015 and 2019.

Closed Circuit TV showed Kaur entering stores, taking items off shelves, and taking them to the tills for refunds as if they had been legitimately purchased.

Kaur was convicted of 26 counts which included fraud, possessing and transferring criminal property, and perverting the course of justice. During police searches of her home, approximately £150,000 in cash was found, as well as more stolen goods.

Senior prosecutor at CPS West Midlands, Giovanni D’Alessandro said. “She also changed her name legally and opened new bank accounts and credit cards under a second identity to avoid detection. She now rightly faces a significant sentence for her crimes and the prosecution will look to recoup as many of her ill-gotten gains as the law allows.”

“Narinder Kaur undertook fraud on a long-standing and wide-ranging manner. It was a very lucrative full-time job that demonstrably made her over half a million pounds over this period of offending. She went to extraordinary lengths to carry out her deceptions, seeking to find a way of defrauding a retailer and then travelling all over the country to replicate the fraud.”