Dilbaagh Singh-Derewal, an ex-Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) bank employee, aged 24 and his accomplice, Gurpal Singh, aged 37, have both been jailed at Birmingham Crown Court for attempting a bank fraud worth £200,0000.
Dilbaagh Singh-Derewal pleaded guilty to bribery and was given a jail sentence of to two years and six months. Gurpal Singh was found guilty of bribery and received three years and two months in prison.
The two men from Birmingham both met while playing five-a-side football. They then went onto plot a scam to bribe other staff within RBS to attempt this huge fraud of thousands of pounds.
Dilbaagh Singh-Derewal used his knowledge of the operations inside the bank to determine how they were going to execute the scam. The pair then plotted what they needed to do.
The duo approached two ex-colleagues working at RBS in February 2017, to help them make a number of transactions, which would illegally transfer £200,000 every time.
The money was to be shifted from what is known as the RBS bank’s ‘suspense’ accounts, where over £3 billion of payments which are invalid are held, into bank accounts controlled by the fraudsters.
The duo also claimed and told the RBS staff that they had bank associates in India who would help with this insider fraud.
In return for their help, the two RBS workers would get payments of £10,000 to £25,000 as bribes.
However, their scam did not materialise because the RBS staff they targeted to assist them reported the fraud to their line manager.
The police were subsequently contacted and the Dedicated Card and Payment Crime Unit (DCPCU) took over the case.
This specialised police unit which investigates crimes for the cards and banking industry started looking into the attempted fraud.
During their investigation, they found that the pair had sent text messages to the RBS staff members with proposals for the money transfers to take place weekly, indicating that the fraud, if it succeeded, would have been much higher in total.
The pair were arrested after enough evidence was found against the men, especially related to phone and text messages.
Dilbaagh Singh-Derewal promptly admitted to his part in the attempted fraud. However, Gurpal Singh did not admit to his involvement in the crime. But the sheer evidence against him found him guilty.
Detective Constable Martin Godsave, who led the case for the DCPCU, welcomed the sentencing of the two men and said:
“These fraudsters attempted to recruit staff members to take part in a high-value fraud.”
“Fortunately, the staff did the right thing by reporting the incident to their line manager who then alerted the police.
“Thanks to their actions, these criminals were caught and brought to justice while thousands of pounds worth of fraud was prevented.”
Martin Lindop, of the CPS Specialist Fraud Division, commented on the case and said:
“These two men used criminal means in an attempt to induce illegal acts from bank staff, in whom trust is essential if the public is to have any faith in the security of the banking system.
“It is only because those employees refused to carry out these dishonest acts that the bank was not defrauded on a large scale.
“The CPS was able to provide irrefutable evidence proving their involvement in this crime and we hope the sentence passed deters others from engaging in similar actions.”
A similar case of insider baking fraud took place at the Birmingham HSBC bank, where Abdul Khan, aged 32 and Mansoor Sanobar, aged 33, were jailed for committing fraud and stealing over £220,000 from the bank in March 2018.
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