A prolific shoplifter who made more than 500k by tricking stores into refunds for items she never bought has been jailed for ten years.

Narinder Kaur, also known as Nina Tiara, 54, deceived more than 1000 retailers in towns across the UK including Reading and Maidenhead into refunding her for items that she never actually purchased between July 2015 and February 2019.

She was convicted of multiple counts of fraud and other offences across the country from a list of major retailers and was sentenced in her absence on Tuesday, July 30.

Passing sentence, Judge Ian Lawrie KC, at Gloucester Crown Court labelled her as a "thoroughly dishonest individual".

Kaur, of Cleverton, Wiltshire, was convicted of all 26 counts on an indictment which included fraud, possessing and transferring criminal property and perverting the course of justice following a trial that lasted four months at Gloucester Crown Court.

The prolific serial shoplifter made it her full-time career to travel all over the country, steal items from high street stores, and dishonestly claim refunds on those items, sometimes on multiple occasions, that she was not entitled to.

A close examination of her bank and credit card accounts, of which she had very many, showed that she had visited and defrauded Boots stores including those in Cheltenham, Malvern, Solihull, Droitwich, Kidderminster, Dudley and Smethwick.

Over the period between July 2015 and September 2019, she received £60,787.09 in refunds from Boots despite having only spent £5,172.73 with the high-street retailer during that same period.

She received £42,853.65 in refunds from Debenhams despite having only spent £3,681.33 during four years, and she received £33,131.61 in refunds from John Lewis stores in Milton Keynes, Watford, Chester, Cardiff, Chichester, Basingstoke, Nottingham, Newbury, Exeter, Southampton, Reading, Birmingham, Tamworth, and Leicester, having only spent £5,290.36 between August 2015 and December 2018.

She also visited the Monsoon stores in Telford, Shrewsbury, Milton Keynes, Maidenhead, Cardiff, Watford, Trowbridge, Reading, Bridgend, Yeovil and other locations where she claimed £23,000 more in refunds than in payments out to the stores.

Between January and July 2018, Kaur also targeted House of Fraser stores in Bristol, Cardiff, Cwmbran, Bath, Reading, Cheltenham, Birmingham, Swindon, Solihull, Worcester, Exeter and other locations where she spent £2,853.55 and claimed refunds of £23,147.75.

Between 2018 and early 2019, she defrauded Home Sense stores in Bristol, Stafford, Chichester, Taunton, Winchester, Salisbury, Shrewsbury, Oxford, Cannock, Solihull, Cardiff, Worcester, Farnborough, Maidenhead, and Swindon of £19,540.17 yet she only spent £1,181.45.

In addition, over the same period, she defrauded TK Maxx of some £14,563.53.

She targeted Homebase between August 2015 and February 2019 and defrauded the company of £3,238.47.

She also attempted to defraud Wiltshire Council of £7,400 by overpaying using stolen credit cards and then contacting the council for a refund claiming she had accidentally made a payment with too many zeros.

Additionally, she worked with a male accomplice to use stolen bank card details to make payments to her own heating oil supplier.

She also instructed several solicitor’s firms to sue her brother and arranged for an accomplice to make payments in the thousands of pounds using stolen card details which she then asked the solicitors to pay to her.

She also lied to the court and produced false documentation to avoid being convicted of speeding offences and to relax her bail conditions.

During two police searches of her home, around £150,000 in cash was found hidden away as well as stolen goods.

The CPS was able to prove the case using financial data, retail records, witness evidence and CCTV which proved Kaur’s pattern of offending.

She was seen on CCTV entering stores, taking items from the shelves and taking them to the tills as if they had been previously purchased.

A close examination of her accounts confirmed the pattern of purchases and refunds and that the same process seen on the CCTV was being repeated on hundreds of occasions.

The final part of her crime was to lie in the face of court proceedings, to mislead the court and try to affect the outcome.

Each lie she made to the courts was uncovered piece by piece and disproven so her perversion of justice could be uncovered.

After sentencing, Steve Tristram, a fraud investigator for West Mercia Police, said: "She is, without doubt, the most dishonest person I've ever dealt with in 40 years of policing.

"She exposed loopholes in till operating systems. A lot of those, I'm pleased to say, have now been closed.

"She would very often steal items, claiming that she'd previously purchased them.

"She would then buy additional items, obtain refund receipts, take that to another store and fool the store operator into believing that she'd previously purchased those items."

Mr Tristram said Turner previously had one or two successful businesses.

He added: "I think what she found was that she could make a lot more money out of retail fraud," he said.

"It was it was easy for her. She did this so often that she became adept at it. And £2,000 a week is a lot of money."

Kaur had been on the police's radar for some time before West Mercia Police's Fraud Team began a nationwide investigation into her finances.

They watched hundreds of hours of CCTV footage from shops which showed the con woman taking items from the shelves, placing them in a trolley before heading to the tills where she demanded a refund.

Giovanni D’Alessandro of the CPS said after sentencing: “Narinder Kaur undertook fraud in a long-standing and wide-ranging manner.

"It was a very lucrative full-time job which demonstrably made her over half a million pounds over this period of offending.

"She went to extraordinary lengths to carry out her deceptions, seeking to find a way of defrauding a retailer and then travelling all over the country to replicate the fraud.

"She also changed her name legally and opened new bank accounts and credit cards with a second identity to avoid detection.

"She now rightly faces a significant sentence for her crimes and the prosecution will look to recoup as many of her ill-gotten gains as the law allows."