A POLICE officer cracked a £1.2m bank fraud – using his trusty Scout manual.
Det Con Chris Stephens, who is the former Scout district commissioner for Huddersfield, used the Scoutmaster’s A to Z first published in 1958 to decipher the code.
Yesterday, the fraudsters were sentenced to more than 25 years at Nottingham Crown Court.
Ansir Khan, an employee of Cater Allen Private Bank in Sheffield, had accessed private customer bank details and passed them on to his accomplices.
The criminals then rang up the bank and pretended to be real customers so they could transfer large sums of money into their own accounts.
The court heard that to avoid being caught by his managers, 22-year-old Khan wrote personal information down in a secret code – substituting letters for numbers and symbols.
When Det Con Stephens, 48, raided Khan’s house with the rest of the West Yorkshire Economic Crime Unit they found the codes jotted down on post-it notes.
The former Fartown High School pupil told the Examiner the team struggled for about two weeks to crack the code.
It was only when a colleague joked that it was something the Scouts would do that he thought up the bright idea.
Det Con Stephens, who started Scouting 40 years ago at New North Road Baptist Church, said: “The alarm bells started ringing and I said to myself – I’ve seen that somewhere before.
“It’s unique and it’s certainly one of those moments that really stands out.
“You don’t realise that something you have learned as a youngster will serve you later on in life.
“But that’s what the Scouts is all about. Despite spending millions of pounds developing new forensic techniques, sometimes it is the old and trusted methods that are the best.”
Det Chief Insp Steven Taylor, who was in charge of the investigation, said Chris has taken a lot of stick over his 21 years as a police officer and four years in the fraud squad for the all the effort he puts into the Scouts.
He said: “It’s light-hearted banter really and we all admit making jokes about his knots.”
