One woman and five men were arrested during raids in Essex, Middlesbrough, London, and Birmingham on Wednesday by the City of London Police.

The group is alleged to have defrauded mobile phone network providers including O2 in phone line scam that streamed overseas.

Over 900 iPhones were purchased via fake names and used to dial £10 per minute phone numbers on a consistent basis leaving the mobile providers to foot the bill.

The conspirators are accused of using companies as a front in order to keep their identities secret and launder profits from the scam.

Five were charged with conspiracy to conceal their illegal profits over the period of January to August of 2010.

The sixth was charged with possessing letters, a sim card, and other information that was used in the fraudulent activity.

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Eric Fitzpatrick Danison would pose as a businessman so that his victims would offer him access to credit totalling up to millions of pounds in exchange for advance fees.  He then would transfer the stolen funds over to different Swiss bank accounts to hide what he was up to.

It took two and a half years of tracing Danison’s actions until the North Yorkshire Police were able to pinpoint him.

At the time of his arrest, Danison was said to be involved in investment scans worth up to £23m.  Last month Danison pleaded guilty to several counts of fraud at the Birmingham Crown Court and received 11 years in jail.  In addition, he is not allowed to be a company director again for the next 15 years.

On top of this, he was given a 15 year crime prevention order once he finishes his prison sentence so that his activities can be monitored.

A spokesman for the police stated that Danison is a conman who took advantage of people on an international level including citizens within North Yorkshire.

Danison covered up his crimes by running a company named Amekel Capital out of a rented office space in Canary Wharf in London.

He was caught last year when he tried to launder £1.5m of his profits by purchasing the Northamptonshire country house Passenham Manor.

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Zachodni was caught browsing through photos in a private folder on a customer’s computer and then attempting to use information found to hack into an online banking account.  He was caught due to a Sky News investigation in which a laptop rigged to have a simple problem was given to him with a webcam that secretly recorded his repair efforts.

Not only did the repair man try to access an online banking account, he also took some time to look at bikini photos of the photographer in folder marked private, hack into her Facebook, and log into her eBay account.

According to reports from the newspapers, the repair man made six separate attempts to break into the bank account online.

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Amanda Thomas, aged 43, told a specialist law firm that she was worth £250m and had properties located across the world as she asked them to draw up legal documents to serve as a will for her three children after she died.

In return, lawyers from Thomas of Penrhyn Bay, Conwy did work valued at £43,000 for her before it emerged that she was lying. In Mold Crown Court on Friday it came out that she was actually receiving benefits and simply looking for attention.

Judge Niclas Parry questioned why the lawyer who handled her claims, Drummond Kerr from the Meridian Law firm, a specialist tax and estate firm, did not question her false claims earlier.

Last September she met with the lawyer in a seven hour meeting and told him that she had accumulated a large amount of wealth and had 70 properties spread throughout the Caribbean, the Middle East, the Far East, Europe, and Africa.

Kerr stated that it was a remarkable story but still plausible and that at the time he had no reason to doubt that she was telling the truth. She told him that she was terminally ill with a short life expectancy and needed advice on how to handle her global assets.

In all 43 complex documents were prepared for her that included various trust agreements and multiple wills.  When suspicions were raised it was found she had no money to pay for the work, no assets, and was not suffering from cancer.

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Romanian Horea Dumitru, aged 22, and Hungarian Kristzan Racz, aged 31, plead guilty to the fraud which took place in Edinburgh on March 1^st.  An off duty policeman caught the pair when he saw them using the cards.

The Edinburgh Sheriff Court told the pair that custody was the only sentencing option.

Before the sentence was passed, the court was told that the pair’s flat contained a card cloning factory that was filled with equipment which was found during a police raid.  During the raid officers seized 24 false cards, £1,140 in cash, mobile phones, computer programmes from laptops, gift cards, and memory cards.

Sheriff Scott stated that the pair pled guilty to many serious charges due to the fact they were involved in premeditated fraud and had the equipment to prove they had planned on committing many more fraudulent acts implying that they were in essence caught in the act.

At a prior meeting, fiscal depute Ruth Ross-Davie stated that the off duty police offer saw the pair acting oddly and observed them feeding a variety of cards repeatedly into the machines.

The plot worked by attaching a false fascia to each ATM machine so that the cards could be used to take out money instantly.

The jail terms were dated back to March 2^nd when the pair was first arrested.

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They were apprehended by police when one of the men was stopped at a Hull Port search in 2007 and his laptop was taken.  The laptop led them to the laundering operator, Suhail Tufail, who pled guilty to fraud charges and received a five year jail sentence at the Manchester Crown Court.

It was in May of 2007 when Humberside Police stopped three men during a routine search in Amsterdam, at which point a ‘suspicious’ laptop owned by Arfan Rasool was taken and investigated by the Manchester Police’s economic crime unit.

Officers discovered that the hard drive and two other computers confiscated from Rasool’s home held the details off of over 7,000 bank cards.  This prompted the seizure of Suhail Tufail’s computer which held the same details.

After tracing the cards they discovered that many of the cards had been used to purchase iTunes vouchers which led to the discovery that the vouchers were sold at a lower price to launder cash.

Greater Manchester Police Det. Insp Neal Colburn stated that this was a very complex fraud that was pulled off on a massive scale with the group believing they had come up with a sophisticated and untraceable way to launder money until the police intervened.

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The Carmarthenshire council has issued a warning to all food producers after prosecutions progressed regarding eggs that were branded ‘laid in Wales’ and ‘free range’ incorrectly.

In the light of the new court cases, leaders in the farming industry have asked that the new Government contain a supermarket ombudsman that will be able to enforce the Code of Practice of labelling according to Grocery Suppliers.

Businesswoman Linda Cavill from Llanelli was fined this past March for selling eggs as ‘free range’ that was actually battery produced.  She pleaded guilty in court to two offences against the Eggs and Chicks Regulation of 2009, and to another offence that was against the Food Safety Act 1990.  Also, during this month a firm from Carmarthenshire was fined for labelling eggs as ‘laid in Wales’ that were English produced.

Lampeter Eggs pled guilty to three accusations that they did not correctly label food since they stated eggs came from Wales which in fact did not, which is against the Food Safety Act.  The company told the court that they were mislabelled in order to complete a contract for Welsh eggs.

Officials feel that the cases show a much larger problem in which there has been a large demand for organic, local, and free range products that companies have matched by mislabelling items instead of actually meeting the demand due to costs.

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Those who have been watching the Bill can contest that there is still plenty of debate yet to come as Stage 2 is yet to be passed, but regardless of the feelings on both sides, it is still worth taking note of what prompted the consumer group to ask the OFT to consider if Scotland’s legal services market is competitive enough.

Some consumers feel that the business structure of lawyers is to restricting to them without offering much choice or innovation.  There are a few lawyers that would embrace more flexibility in their work styles and the chance to offer services in a new manner.

On the other hand, some people feel that the bill was created with big business in mind, but that idea is surrounded by misdirection and misunderstanding of the new legislation.  A proper understanding of the bill will show that it is focused on the public and modernizing the way lawyer services is offered.

It also provides a way for legal services to be offered up to the public along other services that they may need and at times by other providers who may be offer different but more unique expertise tailored to their needs.  The criticism however lies in the Stage 2 part of the bill, which will define that those services are, who will provide them, and what exactly the public demand is.

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According to a report, the group Which? filed a complaint in 2008 against the law firm on behalf of the consumer group stating that Davenport Lyons randomly sent them threatening letters accusing them of downloading media content that is copyrighted illegally.  The notices also demanded that the firm be paid for all downloads.

Which? expounded in the complaint that the letters from the law firm threatened the alleged file shares with legal action if they did not immediately start payments that totalled up to hundreds of pounds in some cases.  The consumer watchdog group claimed the letters were excessive in nature and that the firm did not have substantial evidence to support their claims of illegal downloading.

According to reports, the firm accused over sixty people of downloading a pornographic film illegally although they did not know what content mechanism was used to complete the download.  Additionally, most of the people threatened were said to feel angry, scared, and disturbed by the claims.

Head of the affairs at Which?, Deborah Prince, stated that the group is pleased to see the SRA finally take some action and hopes that their impending investigation will start to actually favour consumer rights and take action against tactics that are best defined as school yard bullying.

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The label stated that the wine was handpicked and had the dark flavours and aromas of ripe plum and black cherry.  They were caught by the Languedoc-Roussillon fraud squad in Southern France.

Included in those convicted of a fraud of £6m were vineyard managers, Ducasse the wine merchant, its conglomerate Sieur d’Arques, and a broker.  The wine was made with cheap merlot and syrah grapes and then represented as pinot noir resulting in the sale of 18m bottles to Gallo under the brand of Red Bicyclette.

One of the largest fines handed out was to the local director of Ducasse, Claude Courset, who was the mastermind of the fraud and was assigned a £45,000 fine and a six month suspended sentence.  Other prison sentences were assigned and suspended and fines ranged from £3,000 to £180,000.

In addition, the Sieur d’Arques trading company received a fine of £180,000 for giving the fake pinot noir to Gallo and all the executives except for two have admitted their guilt.  Despite the high fines, they are still less than want the prosecutor, Francis Battut, had requested as he sought out a custodial term against Courset.

The company formed their defence around the fact that there is a large grey area surrounding wine definitions. As much as 25% of the dodgy pinot found its way to UK supermarket shelves

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