Bum Fries? Surely that’s not real…
Picture the scene. You’re sat at home and suddenly you get that “eureka moment” where you think of an ingenious way to quickly make yourself nearly £7 million without too much effort.
It’s a great idea but unfortunately it’s completely illegal.
Still, with some cunning deception you may be able to get away with it and live the rest of your life in wealthy comfort.
Fortunately for the honest, hard working people amongst us 39 year old Mr Gregory Roberts wasn’t the brightest criminal out there.
Mr Roberts, who called himself “Lord Roberts”, attempted to obtain various tax refunds totalling £6.8 million. As part of his plan he forged a fake invoice (including fake VAT suffered).
Now, I’m not a tax inspector so I don’t know exactly what they would be looking for in terms of potentially fraudulent fake invoices but the fact that the invoice was for the pretty significant sum of £18 million and also didn’t have a date on it would probably have raised a few alarm bells.
However it was the address on the fake invoice that was particularly interesting.
If any of you have been lucky enough to visit Dumfries in Scotland you’ll know that it’s a lovely picturesque town.
Mr Roberts decided to print his fake, undated invoice with an address in Dumfries and whilst he managed to get the right post code he made the rather splendid typo of Bum Fries instead of Dumfries.
Genius! This man should be a comedy writer and not a fraudster.
“Lord Roberts” was subsequently arrested at his business premises (his one bed-roomed apartment) and admitted two charges of fraud.
He is currently in jail.
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