Headlines:
| UK immigration tracks Jamaicans in identity theft ring |
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| Tuesday, 25 September 2007 | |
 Immigration authorities are on the hunt for several
Jamaicans who have stolen the identities of Britons.One man was Tuesday found guilty of supplying the Jamaicans with the fraudulent documents they used to assume their new identities. Civil Servant Charles Mighton was found guilty of forgery after helping seven men he did not know fraudulently obtain British passports. He had countersigned their applications claiming that he had been friends with them for over three years. Ten year passports were issued to the seven men named by police as Walters, Triscal, Bishop, Wooly, Thompson, Taylor and Hayles. So far only one has been caught. Walters is really the Jamaican national, Philbert Williams who was picked up by American Immigration when trying to enter New York on a fraudulent passport. Fingerprint checks showed his real identity and he was deported to Jamaica. Mighton's conviction follows that of another Department of Work and Pension worker, Valentino Custerly who was sentenced to two years and two months in jail for falsely completing and fraudulently signing 12 fraudulent passport applications. Police found one of the false passports in the name of Powell in a raid on a flat in South London in June last year, hours later found to be Andre Craig Smith, a Jamaican national who had paid for one passport in the name of Powell and another in the name of Phillips as well as a replacement passport after claiming the first one was lost. He was picked up by American Immigration Authorities twice, once arriving at New York's JFK Airport as Phillips and then again posing as Powell on a train crossing the border from Canada. Also found in the flat raid was a wedding photo connecting Smith to Kevin Moscoe another man who obtained two passports from Custerly. Newspaper cuttings found in the flat said Moscoe had been murdered in Jamaica in December 2003 after being stabbed 13 times. |