Episode 2 Saints and Scroungers

Every year, billions of pounds of our taxes are spent on

those in genuine need of financial help.

It's money that provides a lifeline for people who deserve our support.

Everything was crumbling around me.

But unfortunately, about £1 billion goes on lining

the pockets of those who aren't entitled to it.

This is just pure greed and nothing else.

But those trying to cheat the system are being watched.

We knew where to look straight away.

Welcome to the world of Saints and Scroungers.

Saints and Scroungers shines a torch

on the light and the dark side of the

benefits system, and those who set out to deliberately steal

from the public purse.

So on one hand, you have the deserving, on the other side, the self-serving.

It's a battle that's fought everyday across the UK.

Investigators fighting to bring fraudsters to justice

and the saints fighting to make sure people in genuine need get

what they are entitled to.

Coming up on today's show -

A benefit fraudster who spent 30 years on the run,

using a stolen identity.

I've covered hundreds of court cases over the years and many fraud cases,

but as far as they go, this was one of the most bizarre.

It was like a plot from a film.

And a pensioner gets her life back on track,

thanks to finally getting the support she was entitled to.

There's no doubt in my mind that without those added benefits,

we would never have been able to achieve

what we've done with Dorothy.

Making ends meet is difficult enough.

If you're a single mum, surely you're entitled to a bit of help

putting food on the table and keeping a roof over your head.

But one mum in Oxford seemed to be asking for more help than most.

Meet Nina Raymont, a 59-year-old mother of two.

After decades living abroad,

Nina and her children returned to the UK in 2009.

Settling in Oxford, she applied for the Housing Benefit

and Jobseeker's Allowance she was entitled to.

But just weeks after she started receiving her benefits,

she came to the attention of an Oxford City Council

fraud investigator.

Due to the nature of her job,

the council employee has asked to remain anonymous.

One of our housing officers had noticed that there were two people

apparently living at the same address,

and that they had a single common detail that just seemed really odd.

Both of these women seemed to have a family member with the same name.

It was enough to set alarm bells ringing for the fraud team,

and in November 2009, the investigation got underway.

Where information suggests there may be fraud,

I use council systems to check all our information that

we hold as Oxford City Council.

I gather evidence and check inconsistencies.

Looking over the initial discrepancies in this case,

the investigator knew there could be a reasonable explanation.

It could simply have been that there were two people

who were totally unrelated living at a house,

so yes, it's quite possible that could have been

completely above board.

The only way to find out is to check,

and the first move in any investigation is to look

into the backgrounds of the two claimants at the one address -

Nina Raymont and a Sandra Forshaw.

With Nina, it appears that she'd been living abroad

and had returned to the UK with her two children in 2009,

and that's when she first appears on Oxford City Council's records.

Nina Raymont had applied to the Department of Work and Pensions

for Jobseeker's Allowance, and was living at that address,

and because she was getting Jobseeker's Allowance,

that allowed her to also claim Housing Benefit.

Sandra Forshaw also appears to have resettled in the UK,

as she started her requests for council housing

just a few months after Nina.

Investigation manager Carol Quainton was overseeing the case.

We investigate welfare benefit fraud.

More recently, we have moved into and are now investigating housing

tenancy fraud and other corporate issues as well.

And the team at Oxford City Council don't mess about.

Last year, for example, the investigation team here in Oxford

looked at about 1,600 benefit claims.

As a result of the ones here in Oxford that we investigated,

actually raised just under £700,000 of benefit

that had been paid to claimants that they weren't entitled to

for one reason or another.

So the team needs to establish whether Raymont and Forshaw

are both entitled to receive benefits.

Their initial research shows both women appear to be claiming benefits

or asking for council assistance legitimately

using a British identity.

The investigators decide it's time to cut to the chase.

The housing officer had already spoken to the landlord

and had tentatively clarified who was living there,

and according to the landlord,

there was just one adult female living there and paying him rent.

That person's name was Sandra Forshaw.

So that confirmed that something was wrong.

So, hang on, there are two people claiming to live at the address,

but the landlord only knows one of them.

Time to put in a call.

Using the housing officer, the team sits back and waits for the answers.

He rang Sandra Forshaw to ask her about something

in relation to her request to the council for support and help

with her looking for housing.

And he asked her if she knew Nina Raymont.

And Sandra said that Nina was a friend of a friend,

and she didn't know many people in the UK,

so that's how she knew Nina.

It's a rather clumsy explanation, and there was more to come.

The following day Nina Raymont rang into the council

and said that she wanted to cancel her Housing Benefit claim

because she had never actually lived at that address.

She had lived throughout the time of the benefit claim in London,

and she'd completely forgotten about her housing benefit claim.

Now it's too much of a coincidence for the fraud team.

Forshaw is called one day,

and Raymont calls back the next to cancel her benefits.

I got to know about the phone call later in the day.

As a matter of course, the council keeps phone calls

for a length of time,

so I obtained the recording and listened to it again,

and it was quite clear that the voices of Nina Raymont

and Sandra Forshaw were very, very similar.

OK, so could these two women have more in common than just an address?

The investigators couldn't be 100% sure,

but there is one more thing that they are certain of.

In December 2009, Sandra Forshaw moved house, having been successful

with the council in her application

for improved council housing for her and her family.

Once in the new property, the claims came in thick and fast.

In this road in Headington, Sandra Forshaw was claiming Housing Benefit

based on her being in receipt of pension credit.

Sandra was moving, but then the investigators

aren't standing still themselves.

Arduously studying the paper trail,

the team gets the break they've been waiting for.

One thing I found was that both Nina Raymont

and Sandra Forshaw had given the same mobile number

to a government agency.

I also looked at handwriting comparisons

and those things also made me think, "Yes, I'm on the right lines."

Well, the team may think they're on the right lines,

but as the investigation continues, so does the confusion.

When arrested, the individual claimed that her true name

was Sandra Forshaw.

Right, it's farewell to the fraudsters,

and bid a warm welcome to people that we call saints,

those in our society who help others in genuine need,

but are too proud or don't know how to claim what is rightfully theirs.

If you lead a busy, active life, and you're surrounded by friends and

family, it can be hard to imagine a time when you need to ask for help.

But all it takes is a couple of little twists in your life,

a couple of turns of events,

and before too long it can be you who's wondering, who do I turn to?

It's a question 84-year-old Dorothy didn't know the answer to,

after her day-to-day life became a struggle in 2007.

Having suffered a stroke,

her active, independent life changed for ever.

That's how it started.

After her stroke, Dorothy's ability to look after herself

and her bungalow in Croydon started to slip.

Her life took a turn for the worse,

and she became ill and more and more isolated with each day.

In November 2011, this led to her collapsing

and being admitted to Croydon University hospital.

Dorothy was admitted with a urinary tract infection.

We feel that this was probably due to the fact

that she wasn't able to manage her dietary requirements at home.

Rachael Colley and the avoidance team

specialise in dealing with cases like Dorothy's.

Their job is to spot issues with people's home lives,

so when they're discharged from hospital

things don't continue to go downhill.

Enter Gill Cooksley.

She's the Red Cross representative who was brought in

to help out with Dorothy's case,

and we'll see for ourselves what an impact she's going to make.

We work at Croydon University Hospital

and we run a project which helps people who for six to eight weeks

when someone comes home from hospital.

And Gill and her colleagues stepping in to help Dorothy

had a ring of karma to it.

I was a junior in the Red Cross during the war,

because I was too young to be called up.

So I used to go to the East Surrey Hospital

every Saturday and Sunday,

report to matron and ask her what I could do.

Some of them had arthritis and couldn't write, so I'd write the letters out for them.

You know what they say? What goes around, comes around,

and so I've come to meet Gill to find out about the Red Cross

and how they first got involved with Dorothy.

How did you first find out that Dorothy needed some help?

Dorothy was really anxious about going home, so the occupational

therapist asked if we would come and visit Dorothy,

primarily to actually take her to look at a residential home.

We just went to have a look,

with an idea that I would then help the transition.

She decided she would like to go there,

but for that to happen, she needed to sell her house,

and in the time frame that we had it was too unmanageable to sell the house

and release enough money for her to go into a home

it wasn't possible.

So Dorothy's hope of moving to the residential home

just wasn't achievable and any mention of her moving back home didn't go down very well.

Gill even visited the bungalow with Dorothy, and witnessed first hand

just how scared she'd become of living by herself.

Dorothy just felt absolutely shattered

and overwhelmed with emotion when we went on the home visit.

She managed well, but just became so quiet and withdrawn.

And you could just tell that she was riddled with worry

about how she was going to cope.

The discharge date loomed, and the team knew

they had their work cut out

persuading her she could be independent once again.

Dorothy could not really believe that life would be different

in her bungalow. She just felt that she would slip back

to where she had been,

spending a lot of time just in the bed,

because it was the warmest place in the house for her.

She was really fearful of using the central heating system

and spending too much money on heating.

Working closely with the avoidance team, Gill and volunteer Millie

set about trying to sort out Dorothy's bungalow.

Millie and I went to Dorothy's house and spent four or five hours

just cleaning, trying to give it a fresh, spring-clean look.

We also put the central heating on, which hadn't been on for months,

and there was a horrible damp smell in the house.

Settling Dorothy back into her own home wouldn't happen overnight,

but the team thought, with the right support,

she could enjoy it once again.

The house means a lot to Dorothy

having shared it for nearly 60 years with her late husband, Ken.

They first met when he visited the law firm she was working for.

And it was...attracted from the very time he walked in,

and then, we weren't on the phone, so he wrote me a letter and said

would I like to go out with him one Sunday, and that's how it started.

Because there were no phones in those days.

Only posh people had a telephone.

I thought he had such lovely blue eyes.

Have you got blue eyes?

Dorothy has good memories of life in her bungalow,

but after months spent in a warm, friendly hospital,

she feared being alone again,

and this is where benefits would be crucial.

Let's talk about Dorothy's financial situation, because I imagine there's

a lot more detective work required to get to the bottom of that.

She was paying a high amount for her gas and electric and her

meter reading was really low and she got a £900 rebate on her gas.

That enabled us to know that we could get the roof repairs

and some other things done.

And in the week she came out of hospital,

I applied for attendance allowance,

so that made a tremendous difference to her income.

She was also awarded pension credits.

Suddenly, she had enough money that we could look at going to a lunch club.

This shift of increased income

made a tremendous difference,

because it meant we could help Dorothy organise her life,

so she could make her house really comfortable

and she could have an outlet,

she could, you know, get to a lunch club and really enjoy herself.

So now we have a situation where the finances are back on track.

The point here is, I suppose, that she and her husband, together,

have paid into the system throughout their lives,

and so to get to this point in their life,

-it should be there to help her.

-Yeah.

It sounds like Dorothy is getting back to her old self again

with the right support.

Everything the Red Cross has done

has helped Dorothy enjoy her home and life again,

and she couldn't agree more.

You have your meals on wheels every day, what do you think about them?

I think they're very good.

What's your favourite meal?

-Steak and kidney.

-Steak and kidney?

What about Helen and Anne that come and look after you?

Oh, they come in the morning and see if I'm awake, check that I'm up

and give me some breakfast if I'm not having breakfast,

and seeing I've got something to eat.

-Do you get on well with them?

-Oh, yes. They're all very nice.

Thanks to Gill, Dorothy is now finally getting

what she's entitled to, everything from getting new glasses

to visiting her lunch club twice a week.

Things happen to us as we get older. They're not always nice things.

They can make life much more difficult.

And money isn't always the answer,

but sometimes, in the right situations, spent wisely

and with the help of someone like Gill, that money can make

the difference between having an existence and living a life.

Now let's go back to the scroungers.

Oxford City Council's fraud investigators have been alerted

to a possible benefit fraud.

Two women are potentially claiming benefits from the same house.

Our first knowledge of Nina Raymont was in November 2009

when she claimed Jobseeker's Allowance and Housing Benefit

from an address in Headington in Oxford.

The problem was her landlord thought he was renting to someone different.

The tenancy for that property with the landlord

was in the name of Sandra Forshaw.

One thing I found was that both Nina Raymont and Sandra Forshaw

had given the same mobile number to a government agency.

The team's hunch, then,

was that Nina and Sandra were the very same person,

and they were now looking at a serious case of an identity theft.

But the question remained,

who was the real person and who was the fake?

It's time to find out,

as the amount of money claimed by the two women isn't pocket change.

Over 10,000 in pension credits

and just over 17,000 in housing and council tax benefit.

The team needs hard evidence that there really is a fraud going on,

and Nina Raymont's first on their hit list.

I requested some identity documents that had been produced

to another government agency, and the driving licence photograph

was compared to the photograph that Sandra Forshaw had produced

by way of her passport, and they were clearly the same person.

The investigators now had the definitive proof they needed.

Nina Raymont and Sandra Forshaw were one and the same!

But which one was real?

Further searches suggested Sandra.

Part of the investigation will often include

requesting credit search information about people.

It shows us what their lifestyle is, it shows us links to addresses,

to other people.

Through this, I found that not only did she have bank accounts,

but transactions on those bank accounts certainly suggested

somebody who was moving or at least buying flights to other continents.

All of this was showing us that there was much more

to Sandra Forshaw than met the eye.

This hardly sounded like someone in need of our support,

a fact which was about to be confirmed.

Part of it involved checking with the National Health Service,

and this revealed that somebody by the name of Sandra Forshaw

was living in east London, now with a different surname,

so I sent a photocopy of one of the passport photographs

to the local authority in the area where this third party lived.

They visited the lady, they confirmed that in appearance

she was a totally different person.

So for the investigators, it now looks like the true identity

of the scrounger is Nina Raymont,

and Forshaw is the identity she somehow managed to steal.

How she's done this, at this stage, is anyone's guess.

The team hopes a search of Nina Raymont's home

will throw some light on the matter.

The police went in, initially ahead, arrested the lady

who was living there in the name of Sandra Forshaw

and I then followed on with another police officer.

Within the house, the police did find quite a lot of documents,

and certainly information that suggested that other applications

were being made to get documents which would have potentially

allowed anyone to get information

and perhaps take on the identity of other people,

and I think we are talking about four or five different surnames.

Just how many identities does one scrounger need?

It looks as if Nina is a serial ID thief up to her neck in lies,

lies that just didn't stop.

When arrested, the individual claimed her rightful name,

her true name was Sandra Forshaw.

And despite the overwhelming evidence against her,

it looks like Nina Raymont is sticking to her guns.

During her interviews under caution, she remains tight lipped.

My understanding is that she chose

to make no comment during the interviews,

and she's perfectly within her rights to do so.

Yes, it's her right,

but the investigators had another ace up their sleeve.

Their research showed Nina had tried to get work in a local charity shop.

In working with the fraud investigation

team from Job Centre Plus, we had the application form

for her Jobseeker's Allowance

and on that form she had declared that she was doing voluntary work

for the charity shop in Headington, Helen And Douglas House.

Gathering more information, we asked for the application form

in relation to her employment,

and subsequently, she also applied to Helen And Douglas House

for a part-time position which was a paid position.

So we obtained that application form, and that form gave the address

that Sandra Forshaw was claiming Housing Benefit from.

For the council, it was yet another piece of damning evidence

against Nina, and they passed it all on to Thames Valley Police.

They took Nina's job application and tested it for fingerprints.

You've guessed it - the prints on Nina's form

matched the lady arrested who was still claiming to be Sandra Forshaw.

Facing such conclusive evidence against her,

Nina Raymont was charged -

the first offence relating to lying under oath

that she was, in fact, Forshaw.

She appeared in court because she'd been charged with six offences.

One offence of perjury, three offences of fraud,

and two offences of stealing another person's identity

and obtaining passports in that name.

And in March 2012, at Oxford Crown Court...

She pleaded guilty to all of the offences.

Across the benefits at the Department for Work and Pensions

and Oxford City Council,

Nina Raymont claimed just under £31,000

using the name of Sandra Forshaw, and she was not entitled to it.

And it was only in court that the whole truth came out.

Through her defence lawyers, Nina finally admitted how and why

she'd hijacked the real Sandra Forshaw's identity.

Court reporter Tom Ayres was there,

covering the trial for the Oxford Mail.

He heard Nina's explanation first hand.

Nina Raymont's scam goes back to the early 1980s.

In 1982, she was living in a suburb of Oxford in a flat with her partner

and that was raided by police,

where they found a lot of drugs in the property.

She was put on police bail but she skipped that bail,

and was later found confused and wandering the streets in Essex

and was placed in a psychiatric unit.

Nina stated it was while she was a patient at the hospital

that she shared a room with the real Sandra Forshaw,

and there she stole some of Sandra's personal documents

and her date of birth and then discharged herself.

On her release from hospital, Raymont got a friend to falsely verify

that she was Sandra Forshaw, and was therefore able

to take out a passport in that false name.

So the real Sandra Forshaw was just an innocent victim

of Nina's bizarre plan.

She never even knew that her identity had been hijacked.

What happened for the next 27 years isn't exactly clear.

That's the thing with identity thieves - you can't trust them!

What we do know, though, is that Nina Raymont left the country,

and there are records of her showing up in Guatemala in the '90s.

When Nina Raymont moved abroad, the trail goes a little bit cold.

We are not entirely sure what happened and what identity

she was living under,

but we know that she married a local man in Guatemala,

having travelling from Europe to America,

and they had a daughter together and adopted a son.

The marriage crumbled though, and in 2009 she returned back to Oxford.

Here, she found her original birth certificate,

her real birth certificate and took out ID documents

in that name as well,

so at that time, she had two documents.

She had her real name and she also had the identity of Sandra Forshaw.

So, nearly 30 years after the original identity theft,

Nina couldn't help herself and decided to cheat the system.

What on earth was she thinking?

I've covered hundreds of court cases over the years and many fraud cases,

but as far as they go, this was one of the most bizarre.

It was like a plot from a film.

It would appear Nina had lived her life abroad

using the Sandra Forshaw identity.

Whether she'd done this because of the serious drug charges

she faced in the UK is anyone's guess,

but the judge ignored these charges in court and sentenced

her for the benefit crimes she'd committed in the here and now.

The judge sentenced her to a custodial sentence for a year,

which was suspended for two years, and she was also ordered

to do 250 hours of unpaid work.

On top of that, the courts have tried to claw back

some of the tens of thousands of pounds that Nina Raymont stole

using the name of Sandra Forshaw.

She's already paid back just under three grand,

and the investigators won't stop till they've got the rest.

What a story, what a life.

Nina Raymont spent 30 years running away from who she really was,

But in the end, it was her own greed that finally caught up with her.