Fayoyin/Craig Saints and Scroungers

This programme tracks down thieves.

It exposes fraudsters and it brings help to those who really deserve it.

This is the front line against benefit fraud.

This is Saints and Scroungers.

Saints and Scroungers is all about busting benefit thieves

who steal millions every year and the crack teams of investigators

determined to scupper their devious scams.

And we also shine a light on those who genuinely need the money

and the people who help them get it.

They are our saints.

The saints get help and the fraudsters get their comeuppance.

Coming up on today's show.

It's the case of a missing care home and the criminal mastermind

whose devious scam robbed the NHS of over £117,000.

She denied any knowledge or involvement in the fraud.

She was very arrogant.

-She's a charmer, isn't she?

-Indeed, yes.

And we meet the blind man

who refuses to be defined by his condition.

I don't want to be as good as anyone else,

I want to be better than everyone else.

I want to be the person that people remember.

Imagine you or someone you knew were terminally ill

and were spending your last days in a nursing home.

Your local NHS will have a budget to pay for that care

and for the professionals who are looking after you.

So ask yourself this. What sort of lowlife would steal that money?

This is Lola Mabun, a 33-year-old senior manager in the NHS.

Her job is to look after the money set aside

for the care of the elderly and sick in Buckinghamshire.

It's a position of great trust and responsibility.

So it came as quite a shock for her colleagues at Buckinghamshire NHS Primary Care Trust

when they discovered that she was suspected of running

a sophisticated scam to cheat the NHS out of a whopping £117,812.30.

In these cash-strapped times, when every penny counts,

'stealing money from the NHS is about as low as you can go.'

I've come to the headquarters of NHS Protect, based in London,

the dedicated division whose job it is

to tackle crime across the Health Service.

Richeall Whelan is a counter-fraud specialist with NHS Protect.

It was her job to investigate the missing thousands that had

disappeared from Buckinghamshire Primary Care Trust's coffers.

Richeall, what alerted you to the fact

something fraudulent was going on?

Initially, Barclays Bank contacted the Primary Care Trust's bankers

because they were suspicious about some activity

in one of their bank accounts.

Large sums of money were going in from the PCT,

and the money was then being withdrawn almost instantaneously in cash.

-Right, so very unusual activity.

-Unusual activity, yes.

Alerted by the bank, the Primary Care Trust started to investigate.

They discovered that between April and July 2009, over £117,000

had been paid from a budget meant for the old and terminally ill

to a care home known as Made House.

31 invoices were received by the Primary Care Trust.

-That's one of them.

-Right. Crikey.

5,322, five-and-a-half grand, five-and-a-half grand.

Big chunks of dough. Five-and-a-half grand.

-We're talking about a lot of money, aren't we?

-Yes, a lot of money.

So this is money for continuing care, which is for somebody who's ill,

or dying and for the Primary Care Trust to pay out so the care home can look after them?

That's correct.

Seriously concerned, the Continuing Care Team

sent one of their staff along to the address on the invoice.

But after half an hour of searching for 22 Winnings Way in Northolt,

they realised something was very wrong.

When they got there, they discovered

there was no road called Winnings Way.

She walked around the area, tried to locate the address

but couldn't find it.

She put the postcode from the invoices into her sat nav,

however, this took her to a Winnings Walk, not Winnings Way.

She knocked on a few doors, but nobody had ever heard of it.

The address just didn't exist.

In fact Made House was beginning to sound more like Made Up House.

But what about the residents?

According to their records,

Made House had five elderly people living there, whose care was

being funded by Buckinghamshire Continuing Care Team.

The Continuing Care Team were very concerned about these patients

because none of the nurse assessors recognised them or the care home,

and they were worried about what conditions they were living in

and whether they were living in somebody's back garden.

The team urgently needed to make contact with their care home,

but the only thing they had to go on now

was a phone number, which they duly rang.

Nobody answered the phone. It just rang and rang until it cut out.

A few minutes later, however, a call was received back from a man

called Richard Sands, who said he was the care home manager.

The team member told Mr Sands they wanted to visit Made House that day.

He said he was away in Manchester

and offered to rearrange for another time.

But that was as far as the conversation went.

When they asked him for a contact number to ring him back, he hung up.

They were clearly not going to get

any satisfactory answers from the care home manager

so the team decided to look within the Primary Care Trust itself

to find out who was the main point of contact with Made House.

A quick check revealed that the manager

who had been signing off all those invoices

was one Lola Mabun.

This is the offices of Buckinghamshire Primary Care Trust in High Wycombe

and this is where Lola Mabun was based.

Lola was responsible for ensuring that

the invoices that came in were genuine and that

the care homes were registered with the Care Quality Commission.

The Care Quality Commission is the new health and social care regulator for England.

Their job is to make sure that care homes meet essential quality and safety standards.

By law, all NHS care homes have to be registered with them.

We made some checks on the Care Quality Commission website

and discovered that Made House wasn't a registered care home.

This set alarm bells ringing and made us suspicious of Lola

because it was her responsibility to ensure

that the homes that were used were registered.

At the time, Lola Mabun was away on holiday in Nigeria,

but shortly after they got the call from Richard Sands,

Lola herself phoned the office

saying she just wanted to check how things were going.

How considerate of her to phone in while she was on holiday.

That shows true dedication.

Or was it just too much of a coincidence?

The timing of this call was very suspicious

and also Lola never normally phoned to find out

how things were going when she was away.

And that wasn't the end of it.

The very next morning,

Richard Sands is back on the phone to the Continuing Care Team

with some of the information that they had asked for previously.

This time he told her that of the five patients, three of them

had passed away, one had gone to live with family in Poland

and the other one was in hospital.

She asked him again where the care home was so that she could visit,

and he hung up on her.

Hold your horses for a minute.

We've now got an invisible care home,

five people that no-one's seen, and large amounts of money

being paid into a mystery account, and suspicion is pointing at

the one person who's responsible for checking all of this stuff,

Lola Mabun.

But Lola was still away on holiday, and until she got back,

Richeall's only lead was the bank account

that the money had been paid into.

We obviously needed to get to the bottom of this.

We needed to find out who the bank account belonged to

so with the help of Thames Valley Police, we got a court order

so that Barclays Bank could tell us who the account belonged to.

Sergeant Richard Cow of Thames Valley Police

obtained the court order for Richeall.

What we can do is we can go to a Crown Court, for example

with a production order

and the production order can be authorised by a Crown Court judge

and we can ask for all sorts of things such as bank statements,

details of transactions, who opened the account, when it was opened.

Sergeant Cow discovered that the account belonged to a 47-year-old

Nigerian man called Bodylon Fayoyin, who lived in Grays in Essex.

We could see no reason why Fayoyin would have this money from the Trust going into his bank account.

He had no links to Made House

and clearly had nothing to do with any sort of care home whatsoever.

We established that some of the money was being withdrawn

through ATMs, for example, being used to pay off household bills.

On some instances it had been transferred to other bank accounts.

That all sounds suspiciously like money-laundering to me.

But one thing is for sure -

it seems very unlikely that any of it was being spent on the elderly.

But who was this Mr Fayoyin,

and what, if any, was his connection with Lola Mabun?

Thames Valley Police were able to help there, as well.

We were also able to establish that there was a relationship

between Fayoyin and Mabun through a family friend

so we could see the leap between the two of them

and that quite clearly they knew each other quite well.

It looks like Lola and her accomplice had it all sewn up,

but what would happen when their house of cards started to tumble?

We asked the nurse assessors to look at the patients' records

and what they discovered was these records were actually made up

almost like a cut-and-paste job from genuine records

to make a fake record.

Next, it's farewell to the scroungers

and hello to the saints, the innocent men and women

all over the UK, in dire need of government help,

and the people who show them the way to claim what they deserve.

When you're born with a disability, you obviously realise that the whole of your life,

the odds are going to be stacked against you, but how you deal with it and the help and support you get

can make the difference between a life fulfilled and a life frustrated.

John Craig has been blind since birth,

but is determined to pursue his vocation and become a fitness instructor.

Only one qualification stood in the way

of him achieving his dream,

but with no money to pay for the course,

his situation looked hopeless.

I felt like I was running into a wall,

taking a few steps back and running into it again.

John first contacted back in 2009.

He had just finished studying,

and wanted some advice in claiming benefits

while looking for work.

We felt that he should be at least on a middle-rate care component

of the Disability Living Allowance, which we then supported him in getting.

Rob also told him that while he was looking for work,

he was eligible for Employment Support Allowance.

The extra money he was entitled to helped John keep his head above water

at a difficult time, while he searched around for ways

to get this all-important Level II qualification.

'John had heard about a course called Instructability

'which the YMCA ran with the aim of getting more disabled instructors into gyms.

'Trevor Clark is the lead instructor on the course,

'and I went to meet him to find out more about it.'

-Hello, Trevor.

-Hello.

-Good to meet you.

-Nice to meet you.

If somebody wants to apply for these projects, there must be certain criteria they've got to meet.

Yeah, you need to be over 16, living in the London area,

be unemployed, have some experience of using gym equipment,

and also have a disability.

'The course is publicly funded jointly by the YMCA,'

the charity, Aspire, and the Mayor of London Skills Legacy Fund.

It lasts 15 days, during which time participants are taught the theory

of how the body works, how to use exercise equipment

and how to teach this to others.

At the end of it all, if he passes, John will have that vital Level II fitness instructor certificate.

I passed the course and I was extremely happy.

I thought this was going to be the start of a fantastic future.

Now he finally had the qualification he needed, John didn't waste any more time.

He got straight out there and started looking for a job.

Virgin Active were looking for an instructor at their London City branch.

So he sent in an application, and it wasn't long before he got a call.

When I first spoke to John, he was very impressive.

He'd just passed his actual fitness qualification,

but the knowledge he'd gained, along with his desire to get into working in the fitness industry

was really impressive.

Barry thought John was worthy of an interview.

So he invited him along for the recruitment day to be assessed alongside the other hopefuls.

When I got the call to meet him down the gym, I didn't need asking twice.

John, we're sitting here in the gym, you've got a smirk on your face,

-you've got some good news?

-Yes, it's fantastic, I've got myself a job!

As a qualified gym instructor, John has proved he knows his stuff,

but his blindness will make some aspects of the job impossible for him to carry out.

Luckily for John, he already had someone he could turn to for help.

When I found out I'd got the job, I contacted Action For Blind People

and they spoke to me about Access to Work.

Access to Work is a Government scheme that helps disabled people

join able-bodied people on an equal footing in the workplace.

Access to Work provides me with transport for when I need it.

For example, on the early shifts.

Accessible equipment.

So if I need to use a computer at the gym.

And a full-time support worker.

John has complete freedom over who he chooses to be his support worker.

If John was going to employ somebody who is currently unemployed, that would be supporting somebody else

to get back into employment, as well using Access to Work funds.

John chose Jonathan, a family friend who has recently become unemployed.

'My support worker will tell me

'if somebody is doing an exercise and they're not doing it correctly.'

-Are they touching the shoulder?

-Yeah.

-Are they looking at the mat?

-Yeah.

'He's basically just my eyes.'

By paying Jonathan's salary,

Access to Work have made it possible for John to fulfil his potential

and do a job that he loves.

And the good news is that now he's in full-time work,

John's Employment Support Allowance benefits are surplus to requirements.

'I'm ecstatic, it's fantastic.'

There's no doubt that without his guardian angels in the shape of Action for Blind People

and the YMCA, John would not have been able to get where he is today.

If it wasn't for them, I wouldn't have my fitness instructor qualification.

I wouldn't have employment, and I'd still be stuck on benefits.

You with the help of others, you're making it work.

Again, you're just getting over every thing that would normally stand in someone's way.

Yeah, because my method is, if people say I can't, I say you can.

-Good luck to you, mate.

-Thank you very much.

-Shake my hand, because I think you deserve that.

Back now to the world of the scrounger,

where the police and NHS Protect

are working hard to unravel a complicated scam.

The two people in the frame are suspected fraudster, Lola Mabun,

and money launderer, Bodylon Fayoyin.

NHS investigator Richeall Whelan had discovered

that Mabun, in her capacity as senior manager

at Buckinghamshire NHS Primary Care Trust

had signed off over £117,000 worth of payments

to a care home known as Made House,

where five sick and elderly patients were supposedly in residence.

But it turns out that Made House doesn't exist.

There's no sign of any patients, and the money

has been going into a bank account

where it's been siphoned off by this mysterious Mr Fayoyin.

He was moving the money between other accounts,

and withdrawing money in cash,

and we could see no reason why this money would be going to him.

The police had discovered that Mabun and Fayoyin were family friends,

but they had no concrete proof they were partners in crime.

'However, Richeall's first priority was the five patients

'who needed to be properly accounted for.'

So you've established that Made House was a completely made-up, fictitious address.

But what about the patients getting the care?

What we established was the invoices related to five patients

and when we looked on the continuing care database,

all five patients were on there,

so their records looked perfectly legitimate.

We started making enquiries about these patients

because we were concerned about where they were living.

Where did that take you? You never got an address, you have five patients living there.

You must have been at a dead end.

Yeah, but what we did is we asked the nurse assessors

to have a look at the patients' records

to see if they could tell us anything, and what they discovered

was they started to recognise some of the text

as being records that they had written for other patients.

These records were actually made up,

almost like a cut-and-paste job from genuine records to make a fake record.

The whole team was incredibly relieved to discover that

they were no longer looking for five vulnerable patients who may have come to harm.

It was clear that this scam was even more devious

than they had first thought,

and there was now no doubt that they were looking at an inside job.

-Did you have a suspicion?

-We had our suspicions about one member of staff.

She was somebody who was in authority

and she also had access to the records and the database,

and that was Lola Mabun.

So Mabun is now suspected of

authorising payments to a non-existent care home

and inventing a load of fictional patients who lived there.

But Richeall still had no proof she was actually profiting from the scam.

To do that, she needed to prove that Mabun and Fayoyin were working together.

It was time to get back in touch with Thames Valley Police.

One of the things we can do for the NHS that the NHS can't do is to look into phone calls

and data received.

When you make or receive a phone call,

we can look and see who made that phone call to you.

With these powers, the police can trace any number, even if a caller has chosen to withhold it.

So Sgt Cowell was able to provide Richeall with a complete list

of everyone who phoned in to Buckinghamshire Primary Care Trust over the past month.

We checked the records and we found the phone number that Richard Sands used

to call the member of the team was a Nigerian phone number.

We also checked the records

for the phone number that Lola used to call a member of the team,

and we discovered it was the same number.

Having seen that these two numbers were exactly the same, it said to us

that Mabun and the care home manager were working very closely together

and probably sat next to each other when they made the phone call.

So they're in it together, thick as thieves.

By now, below Lola Mabun's two-week holiday in Nigeria was over

and she returned to the UK, but not to work.

When she returned, the decision was made to suspend her

so we could investigate the irregularities in her department.

We didn't at this point accuse her of anything, we just sent her home.

Richeall knew that she needed some hard evidence

to prove her suspicions.

Time to call in the skills of NHS Protect's forensic computing specialist, Catherine Brown.

I've got to say it's like Bill Gates's bedroom in here. What's going on?

Well, this is the forensic computing unit here.

Computer forensics is absolutely vital in criminal investigations nowadays.

-They leave footprints, don't they?

-Oh, yeah, definitely.

Everything you do on your computer, whether it's sending e-mails,

browsing the internet, writing documents,

there's always some trace of it left behind.

Catherine was hoping that Lola's computers

would have quite a tale to tell

and she wasn't disappointed.

We discovered that this e-mail account for Made House

had been set up in Nigeria,

and was being accessed quite a bit in Nigeria.

Finally, it was accessed once here in the UK

from Lola's computer at her home.

At that point, your alarm bells must be ringing.

Definitely, because Lola had just come back from holiday in Nigeria.

But what about those fake elderly residents of Made House,

for whose care the NHS shelled out over £117,000?

Could Catherine prove that they'd been Lola Mabun's handiwork?

We found that she'd been accessing the patient database

and creating and amending records for fake patients.

-She literally made up these patients from different bits of IT? Totally fictitious?

-Yes, she did.

How can you establish it was that person in front of that computer?

I was able to analyse the internet history

around the same time as the database access.

So, somebody was shopping on the internet,

and then we found access to Yahoo e-mail,

which was Lola's e-mail address.

-All this damning evidence collaborates and pinpoints her to that spot?

-Yes.

Cheeky blighter!

Her job is to check up on people running care homes to make sure they're not ripping off the system,

and all the time she's doing just that and he's laundering the money!

Between the pair of them, they've been taking as all to the cleaners.

Richeall was now confident that she had all the evidence they needed.

It was time for Lola Mabun to start explaining herself.

You've got your prime suspect, Lola Mabun, what happened next?

The trust contacted her

and asked her to come in for a suspension interview,

but they received an e-mail cancelling that.

She cheekily sent an e-mail saying, "I can't make it"?

Yes, she told us that she wanted to bring a union representative,

so she needed to rearrange the appointment.

-Fair enough. Did she turn up for the next one?

-She did for the next one

but the police were waiting to arrest her.

On 30th October, 2009,

Lola Mabun was taken to Aylesbury Police Station

and interviewed under caution.

Richeall was the one asking the questions.

What was she like in that interview?

She denied any knowledge or involvement in the fraud.

She was very arrogant.

I don't think she believed we could actually connect her to the fraud.

-She thought she had covered her trail well enough?

-Yes, that's what she thought.

-But you had enough evidence at this point to bang her to rights?

-Yes.

How did she react to that?

She just denied any involvement and blamed some of her colleagues at the Trust.

-Really?

-Yes.

-She's a charmer, isn't she?

-Indeed, yes.

In the meantime, the police

went round to Fayoyin's flat to arrest him.

He wasn't there, but they found documents and bank account details that prove that he'd received

the NHS money, and then moved it around in an attempt to cover its tracks.

A few days later, he contacted the police

and voluntarily came to the police station where he was arrested and interviewed.

What was happening with Lola Mabun?

She was still denying it,

so she was given police bail to return at a later date.

-While you carried on the investigation?

-We carried on, yes.

-She's not giving up easy, is she?

-No, she never admitted it.

After her arrest, Lola was dismissed from Buckinghamshire Primary Care Trust

for gross misconduct, and the court date was set

for 7th February, 2011.

OK, the day of the trial, what happened? I bet you were excited.

Yes, but on the first day of the trial she didn't appear.

So after giving you all these excuses, she'd done a bunk?

Yes, she had.

Richeall was worried that Lola had fled abroad,

even though the police had confiscated her passport.

But the judge allowed the case to proceed in her absence,

and the jury found Lola Mabun guilty.

She was convicted of fraud by abuse of position

and she was sentenced to four years in prison.

In total, she had swindled the NHS out of:

In summing up, the judge said

there was overwhelming evidence to convict her.

She blamed other innocent members of the trust for the fraud.

She was the organiser of the fraud or passed information

on to others to allow them to organise it.

-So, you don't know if she's in this country, Nigeria or anywhere?

-No, we don't know where she is.

-And there's a police warrant out for her arrest.

-That's right,

there is, so hopefully the police will encounter her.

-Let's keep our fingers crossed.

-Yes.

But Richeall did have the satisfaction of seeing

Bodylon Fayoyin brought to justice.

we had a two-week trial and at the end he was convicted of two counts of money laundering.

-What did he get?

-A three-year prison sentence.

But what about the money?

The good news is that they're well on their way to getting it all back.

NHS Protect has recovered £46,000 of the money stolen,

which has been returned to the NHS.

We're seeking to recover the rest of the money

under the Proceeds of Crime Act.

At the confiscation hearing a few months later,

Fayoyin was ordered to repay a further £65,000

and if he doesn't, he faces an additional 20 months in prison.

Lola Mabun and Bodylon Fayoyin took advantage of her position of trust

to ruthlessly steal money from the taxpayer that had been set aside for the old and the sick.

But in the end their dirty deeds caught up with them,

which just goes to show that if you take advantage of society's vulnerable,

sooner or later, it's going to catch up with you.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd