A mom who made more than £500,000 ($600,000) by claiming refunds on items she stole from various stores is facing "substantial" jail time for her crimes, BBC News reports.
Narinder Kaur, who legally changed her name to Nina Tiara, went to various retailers around the UK defrauding the businesses more than a thousand times between July 2015 and February 2019.
When her home was searched by authorities, around £150,000 ($180,000) in cash was discovered along with the stolen items.
Kaur, 53, from Wiltshire, United Kingdom, set her sights on a number of UK chains including Boots, Monsoon, and House of Fraser.
She received more than $50,000 worth of refunds from Debenhams alone despite only spending the equivalent of $4,500 over a period of four years.
She managed to attain the equivalent of $40,000 in refunds from John Lewis stores in Milton Keynes, Watford, Chester, Cardiff, Chichester, Basingstoke, Nottingham, Newbury, Exeter, Southampton, Reading, Birmingham, Tamworth, and Leicester.
Kaur, who had a number of bank and credit card accounts, was accused in court of making stealing her "full-time career".
According to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), she also tried to defraud Wiltshire Council of £7,400 ($9,000) by overpaying using stolen credit cards and then requesting refunds from the local authority on the pretense that she had unintentionally made a payment using too many zeros.
With an unidentified male accomplice, the woman also used stolen bank card details to make payments to her heating oil supplier.
Her trial, which took place at Gloucester Crown Court, went on four months.
At the start of the trial on November 8, prosecutor Gareth Weetman described her as "an intelligent but also a highly dishonest and manipulative individual".
He went on: "The defendant discovered that with many large retailers, if you take an item that they sell into a store, claim you've bought it but don't have the receipt, but say that you just want to exchange it, you're much more likely to succeed."
She was found guilty on all 26 counts on an indictment which included fraud, possessing and transferring criminal property, and perverting the course of justice.
The CPS, which worked closely with police, said it was able to "prove the case" with the use of financial data, retail records, witness evidence and surveillance footage which "proved Kaur's pattern of offending".
Per Sky News, it added: "Close examination of her accounts confirmed the pattern of purchases and refunds and that the same process seen on the [surveillance footage] was being repeated on hundreds of occasions."
Giovanni D'Alessandro, from the CPS, said Kaur "undertook fraud on a long-standing and wide-ranging manner", adding: "It was a very lucrative full-time job which demonstrably made her over half a million pounds over this period of offending.
"She went to extraordinary lengths to carry out her deceptions, seeking to find a way of defrauding a retailer and then travelling all over the country to replicate the fraud. She also changed her name legally and opened new bank accounts and credit cards in a second identity to avoid detection."
Kaur has been remanded in custody until her sentencing - the date of which is yet to be determined.
