A man who defrauded a blind piano teacher out of £185,000 using a Manchester call centre company as a front has been jailed for five years
42 year old Mark Stanner from Macclesfield has been jailed for 5 and a half years at Minshull Street Crown Court after he was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud.
Police in Manchester uncovered a four-year long fraud against the victim, who was a man in his 50s. The victim is blind and has been since birth.
It was revealed through an in-depth investigation, that Stanner used a call centre company in Manchester as a front for his crimes, where he bombarded the victim with phone calls, texts and emails.
The messages to the victim said that he owed funds to various publication companies, the messages claimed that the victim owed money for adverts that had been placed in numerous publications to advertise his trade as a piano tuner. In the beginning, the financial demands were small, these demands date back to 2017. The victim paid the initial demands, requesting that Stanner would leave him alone if he paid. As time went on, these demands progressively got more and more aggressive and frequent.
Because of the amounts of money Stanner demanded from the victim, he had to borrow money from friends and family as he needed to purchase braille software to read a string of invoices that Stanner had falsely created.
In some instances, Stanner left the victim with as little as half an hour to pay his demands such as asking him to pay £4000 within an hour and threatened that he would come and take his property if he didn’t meet the demands.
For over four years, detectives have been investigating and built a strong case against Stanner and uncovered that he was gambling with his ill-gotten gains.
Martina Turner aged 44 of Sunnyside Road, Droylsden was given 18 months suspended sentence and ordered by undertake 200 hours of unpaid work after she was found to have £31,000 of the victim’s money to go through her account to mask her brother, Stanner’s crimes.
Alongside Stanner and Turner, Marvin Scott aged 41 of Charlestown Road, Manchester was jailed for 31 months after he allowed £48,000 from the company to move through his bank accounts to conceal the finances for Stanner.
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