The importance of conducting Criminal Checks

As the story below demonstrates, financial firms run the risk putting their organisations in financial peril by not conducting basic criminal searches. As a minimum media searches should always be part of a proper screening process, since they will unveil any high profile case that reached the local or national press.
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TWO Zimbabwean insurance workers based in Sheffield who plundered customers' personal details then used them to scam hundreds of thousands of pounds from policy holders have been jailed for five and-a-half years.
Failed asylum seekers Edward Dzingai, 27, and Gregory Maumbe, 26, both worked at Norwich Union's Pomona House in Pear Street, Ecclesall Road.
They used their positions to gain access to the personal insurance policy details of 28 "gone away" customers - clients for whom the company had no current address - often targeting elderly or vulnerable people.
Ian West, prosecuting, told Sheffield Crown Court: "Dzingai and Maumbe's positions in the organisation gave them access to the computer databases - the names and details of the policy holders and copies of the signatures of these 'gone away' cases.
"They would use this information to manufacture fraudulent surrender letters and the funds would then be transferred to the bank accounts detailed on these letters."
They targeted 28 policies yielding more than £655,395 between September 2005 and October 2007.
They also tried to steal a further £144,000 but failed.
When police raided their homes and examined their computers they found details of another 53 policies worth £1.5 million.
Dzingai, of Windy House Lane, Manor, and Maumbe, of Fretson Road, Manor, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to obtain money transfers by deception.
They claimed they were forced into the scam by men who threatened to hurt their families in Sheffield and Zimbabwe.
Maumbe admitted receiving up to £40,000 for his part in the operation, while Dzingai said he received between £1,500 and £2,000 for five different transactions.
Sentencing them to five years in prison for the deception case, plus an extra six months for possessing fake passports, His Honour Judge Patrick Robertshaw said:"You were actually possessed of freewill and made the choice to play a crucial, critical role in this fraud over a significant period of time.
"The breach of trust involved was serious, flagrant, calculated, deliberate and protracted."
The prosecution claim Allan Manhire, 26, from Liverpool, arranged the bank accounts through which the money was laundered. He faces trial at a later date.
Several other defendants, some of them UK nationals, have admitted opening bank accounts into which the money was laundered.