At the High Court in Glasgow, Lord Arthurson sentenced Azeem Mohammed to 10 years imprisonment. The offender pled guilty to eight charges of fraud upon elderly and highly vulnerable people, totalling £1,163,269.
On sentencing Lord Arthurson made the following remarks in court:
"Azeem Mohammed, you at yesterday's preliminary hearing at this court tendered guilty pleas to some eight charges of fraud, perpetrated by you in concert with another or others upon elderly and highly vulnerable complainers between January 2022 and February 2024, the sums obtained by you thereby from these complainers respectively ranging from £19,500 up to £333,292.
The agreed total value of the monies obtained by you in the course of this targeted and predatory criminal campaign was £1,163,269. Your victims were aged 86, 89, 88, 77, 82, 85, 84 and 79, respectively.
The distress caused to each of them will be incalculable. The sums taken criminally by you are, in contrast, measurable with precision. Regarded as a whole, this case in my view represents in cumulo one of the worst frauds of this nature to come before these courts. For the record, on my count some £295,000 of the sums thus obtained by you has not been reimbursed by the financial institutions involved. But of course others, including such institutions, and indirectly the public, will have to bear that reimbursed loss. I further note that one of your victims is now deceased. He and his family have lost a non-reimbursed figure of £45,900. What I am saying is this: this is a case with multiple very real victims and similarly real, exactly quantifiable loss.
While you are only aged 35, you have already accrued an appalling record of directly relevant analogous offending. In this jurisdiction you have received custodial sentences for sheriff and jury level convictions for fraud in 2013 and for a fraudulent scheme in 2026. In October 2024 you were, further, in a case which I understand did not proceed to trial, convicted at Manchester Crown Court in relation to the commission by you of a series of frauds against elderly victims, with a total value of £958,949, in respect of which you were sentenced to a period of 6 years and 9 months, reduced from a headline sentence of 9 years, with, I am told, a theoretical earliest date of liberation of 9 November 2027, which date takes account of both that Manchester disposal from October 2024 and your 2026 sheriff court conviction and sentence.
I have considered carefully the submissions in mitigation which were advanced on your behalf yesterday by your senior counsel, and note in particular what was said by him regarding your personal and family circumstances; your acceptance of your criminal responsibility in this matter; the utility of your guilty pleas; your expressed remorse; the approximately coterminous or overlapping nature of the periods libelled in the present case and in the Manchester Crown Court case, which he submits under reference to the sentencing principle of totality, should be dealt with as one whole course of conduct; and the fact of reimbursement to the complainers of certain sums, albeit by financial institutions rather than by you, of course.
You are a serial and committed fraudster, or, in modern parlance, a professional scammer. In the present case you have pursued a despicable criminal project against some of the most vulnerable members of our society, taking a wrecking ball to their lives and those of their families, and indeed the wider community. Your crimes in this case represent multiple violations of individual lives, over a sustained period, involving much planning and while acting on each occasion with others. You targeted a particular elderly cohort of society for your own financial gain, without thought or care for the impact of your crimes upon your victims. In respect, by way of example, of charge four, I infer from the agreed narrative that you sent abusive messages to your victim’s daughter, stating “I scammed your father of GBP 165k.” A further aggravating feature of this case is the role of two of your associates in these crimes who pretended to be a male and female police officer. The Crown accept that you yourself did not do this, but you acted in concert with them, and I regard you as sharing their culpability in this aspect of these crimes.
Indeed, your culpability in this matter in my assessment is at the very highest end of the spectrum, and, using the relevant English guideline as a ready reckoner, the level of financial harm in this case can in my view properly be located at category 1. In addition, the emotional, psychological and financial detriment to your many victims can be characterised as containing a very high impact. Your multiple analogous and indeed escalating previous convictions represent a material relevant and particular aggravating feature of this case.
Turning now to disposal, in these circumstances I now sentence you on the present indictment as follows. I will impose a single in cumulo sentence on charges 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12 and 14. Taking a broad approach to the separate charges, which clearly represent individual components in your campaign of criminal conduct, rather than breaking these down by value or according to what was or was not recovered, I have determined for the purposes of the minute of this hearing to allocate a particular notional identical custodial period of 4 years in respect of each charge, taking into account the relevant context of your criminal history, bringing out a total notional period of 32 years. That having been said, the in cumulo sentence to be imposed today on the present indictment must of course be considerably reduced from that notional total in order to reflect the single course of conduct nature of your criminal behaviour in this matter.
In the whole circumstances, I now select a notional in cumulo headline custodial period on this indictment of 13 years, which in turn must be further reduced to take into account the timing and undoubted utility of your early pleas of guilty at this preliminary hearing. Completing the sentencing exercise, I now confirm that you will on the charges already mentioned serve an in cumulo sentence of imprisonment of 10 years. In recognition of the totality principle, and having regard in particular to the submissions in that regard by your senior counsel in respect of the Manchester Crown Court sentence, I propose to acknowledge and obtemper that principle by refraining from imposing the said disposal on the present indictment on a consecutive basis to any sentence already being served by you, but instead now confirm that this sentence will run from today.
For the avoidance of doubt, the core sentencing objectives in this exercise are punishment, retribution, and, in this case in particular, deterrence in general and the future protection of the public from your own wholly parasitical criminal behaviour.
The court, finally, continues consideration of the Crown motion for confiscation to 1 December 2026 at 10am at Edinburgh High Court.
