Nawaf Abdullahi, 20, travelled from London to Cardiff twice in September 2025 to collect cash from two men aged 78 and 80. He was acting as the courier within a large fraudulent operation in which the pensioners were persuaded to withdraw large sums of money to assist fictional police investigations. Abdullahi was sentenced at the start of December and narrowly escaped prison, receiving a suspended sentence.
The first victim (80) received a telephone call in early September from fraudsters posing as police from New Scotland Yard. The caller manipulated the pensioner into thinking his cash was needed for a police investigation with further phone calls legitimising the scam. The victim initially withdrew £9,000 cash followed by a purchase of £7,000 worth of Euros, he was told that a courier, Abdullahi, would arrive at his Riverside address to collect the money.
On September 3rd the courier arrived via Uber wearing a Covid-style mask and ‘snatched’ the cash from the victim, something which the court heard he was instructed to do. The nature of this transaction led the victim to realise he might have been conned and he alerted the police.
The second victim (78) was persuaded to withdraw a total of £16,000 in cash. He grew suspicious and contacted the HSBC fraud line. Subsequently the 9th of September Abdullahi was arrested at Cardiff Central Station en route to collect the second lot of cash. He was carrying £403.42 as well as two iPhones.
Upon his arrest, Abdullahi admitted that he had been paid to make the two trips but stated he never knew what was inside the packages. He told police that he had made between 5 and 10 similar trips to places such as Portsmouth, Peterborough and Oxford. He explained that upon arriving back in London from such excursions he would drop the packages at a location near King’s Cross.
The admission of such details left the young man feeling scared about how hostile bosses might react, given they knew his family address.
Defence counsel, Alex Krikler, told the court that his client had written letters to the two victims expressing his remorse. He went on to say that Abdullahi was regarded by many as being of good character and that in his 3 months in custody he had obtained several certificates as well as having served the equivalent of a 6-month sentence.
Mr Krikler made the court aware of the presence of Abdullahi’s older brother, a chartered accountant, who was prepared to provide £10,000 in compensation if the court held it were necessary.
On December 4th, HHJ Hobson awarded compensation of £403.42 to the first victim; ordered that Abdullahi do 100 hours unpaid work and handed him a 15-month sentence suspended for a period of 18 months.
The nature of a suspended sentence is that were Abdullahi to re-offend within the 18-month period he would risk immediate imprisonment.
The judge emphasised Adbullahi’s relative youth and that he was capable of ‘taking a positive turn in life’ by starting a railway engineering course later in the month. The judge noted in his sentencing remarks that the total sum defrauded, including the extra trips, would have been in excess of £50,000.
Instances of fraud like this are, unfortunately, very common in the UK.
Professor Nicholas Ryder, an internationally renowned researcher in financial crime, told Gair Rhydd that fraud now accounts for over 40% of the UK’s reported crime. He cited an increase in fraud in the last few years, stating that technological advances and the widespread use of social media have made people more susceptible to becoming victims. Ryder said that the use of vulnerable people, like Abdullahi, as cash couriers is a result of the current industrial scale of fraud, which allows organisations to operate in “hierarchical corporate models”.
This, along with the fact that around 70% of fraud originates overseas makes it incredibly difficult to police. In December of last year, the City of London Police established a new service for reporting fraud, Report Fraud. Ryder welcomes the establishment of this centralised reporting system but said it remains unclear whether it “will have necessary funding and technology to actually make a real difference to the 4.3 million people that reported fraud last year”.