British woman arrested for GBP 140K life insurance fraud in Zanzibar

British woman arrested for GBP 140K life insurance fraud in Zanzibar

A British woman and her teenage son have been arrested after allegedly faking her death during a holiday, seeing the family claim a life insurance payout of £140,000.

The unnamed pair hail from Walsall, West Midlands, and had been on a luxury holiday in Zanzibar, a Tanzanian archipelago off the coast of East Africa.

They claimed that the woman died in a car crash, submitting a death certificate to her insurance company a month later, and reportedly planned to reunite in Canada after receiving the compensation.

However, the insurance company grew suspicious after examining the documents and discovering that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for the local authorities had no record of her death. The suspicion was reported to the City of London’s fraud investigation team, who started looking into the matter.

The woman’s 19-year-old son was found and arrested in the West Midlands by detectives, and he confessed that his 45-year-old mother was still alive. She was then tracked down in Canada and accepted the police’s request to return to the UK, to be arrested at Perry Barr police station in Birmingham and questioned by the City of London’s Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department.

The pair have been bailed until April, along with the son’s 24-year-old guardian who was also arrested and questioned by police.

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