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Pair of Odometer Scammers Will Pay Back 90k Pounds After Tricking Hundreds

Odometer reading 70,000 1 photo
Photo: Wikipedia user Downtowngal
A pair of cousins from Accrington, United Kingdom, were convicted in December 2014 for a massive odometer clocking scheme and will now be forced to pay compensation to their victims.
According to the Lancashire Telegraph, two cousins named Nazim Hussain and Mohammed Aseeb Hussain must surrender their assets and pay compensation to the people they tricked into buying cars with clocked mileages.

A judge ruled that they must compensate 22 of their victims across the country, and the total amount exceeds £90,000.

However, the court has found the pair bought and sold over 500 vehicles in 2011 and 2012. They paid a total of £3.3 million to just one auction company over the two-year period, and collected over three million pounds from the sale of cars with tampered odometers.

In total, they removed around four million miles from the odometers of the vehicles they sold (6.4 million kilometers). The fraud was discovered after several customers filed complaints regarding their used car operations in Accrington, and one vehicle was found to have its odometer turned back by 234,000 miles (376,000 km).

The scammers have three months to pay compensation to their victims, or they will get 20 months (13 for Aseeb Hussain) added to their ongoing sentences if they do not respect the court’s decision.

One of the victims stated that he did not even make it home after buying a car from the fraudsters. Considering the team "invested" their illegal profits in purchasing new vehicles, refunding or compensating all of the victims on such short notice is close to impossible.

At their 2014 trial, both pleaded guilty to participating in a fraudulent business. Nazim was sentenced to 26 months in jail, while Aseeb received a 24-month sentence. Initially, the investigators focused on 36 cars, and only 22 victims will receive compensation. Estimates place the total loss of the 36 victims at over £150,000, while the assumed profit from selling the vehicles mentioned above was of £40,000.

According to a report, three cars out of the 36 checked had their odometers turned back by over 200,000 miles (321,000 km), while most of the vehicles were altered by over 100,000 miles (160,000 km). None of the vehicles tested by investigators had less than 46,000 miles (75,000 km) removed from their odometers.
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About the author: Sebastian Toma
Sebastian Toma profile photo

Sebastian's love for cars began at a young age. Little did he know that a career would emerge from this passion (and that it would not, sadly, involve being a professional racecar driver). In over fourteen years, he got behind the wheel of several hundred vehicles and in the offices of the most important car publications in his homeland.
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