£30m cheque book robbery

Police today smashed a £30 million stolen cheque books racket involving Royal Mail insiders.

Officers seized a gang whose members are believed to be from Angola and Congo. They are suspected of stealing money from accounts of unsuspecting victims using cheque books intercepted by a postman working from a London depot.

More than 30 arrest warrants were executed today in one of the biggest operations of its kind.

A total of 500 officers, 400 from the Met, raided addresses across the country at dawn. There were arrests in London, the Home Counties, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Luton.

Detective Chief Superintendent Keith Surtees said: "We have the whole conspirational chain, we have them from top to bottom." He said it had been a huge and systematic fraud.

The gang stole about 1,200 cheque books destined for addresses in north-west London, including wealthy residents of Golders Green. They managed to stay "under the radar" by only using two cheques out of each book and taking out small amounts at a time.

Mr Surtees said that the fact that cheque books are delivered by post had "allowed this fraud to take place".

The raids are a culmination of a year-long investigation codenamed Operation Bangor, which followed complaints from the public that money had been taken from their accounts.

Detectives targeted the entire suspected criminal network, from the postal worker taking the cheque books, through to those in charge of distributing them to regional cells and those who wrote up and deposited the cheques. Met officers smashed their way into 27 addresses in London and the Home Counties, including Islington, Camden, Croydon and Surrey.

Among the addresses targeted was a first-floor one bedroom flat in a council block at the Dovehouse Mead estate in Barking.

At precisely 6am 12 officers ran up the stairs in the block and smashed in the front door with a battering ram.

Among the priorities was to obtain fingerprints as soon as possible to send to a specialist team ready to cross-reference them with those taken from the stolen cheque books.

The operation began in June 2004. Investigations showed cheques - from books that had never been received - were being paid into hundreds of bogus accounts set up using fake identification.

Over almost a year the gang took up to £5million using this method, with the accounts swelling to £30 million through various other activities, thought to have included benefit fraud.

Working in conjunction with Royal Mail investigators, police identified one postal worker at the Golders Green depot who had been taking the cheque books.

Detectives confirmed that eight people within the Metropolitan Police area were arrested this morning.