- Thursday, April 25, 2024
By: Keerthi Mohan
A BUSINESSMAN has been accused of making fraudulent claims and using dummy testimonials to promote his £1million airport parking scam, a court in the UK heard.
Asad Malik told a jury that he cut and pasted comments from other airport valet parking sites alongside real reviews on websites for Easy Meet and Greet and London Gatwick Parking.
The 38-year-old is also alleged to have used a photo of a hospital 400 miles away to trick travellers at Gatwick Airport into thinking their cars would be safe.
The cars were then parked in muddy fields and petrol stations, Lewes Crown Court in Brighton heard.
Keir Monteith QC for the defence asked Malik about poor grammar and spelling on the sites, and Malik admitted he hadn’t checked the contents “word by word”.
Saying English was not his first language, Malik, who is from Karachi, said he outsourced the design of his site to a firm in Pakistan.
He said he had instructed his web developers to remove references to CCTV and told the court around 20 positive reviews had been provided by another company.
Some other testimonials were fake, admitted Malik, saying: “Those are dummy testimonials. These are not my customers. These are example ones.”
Malik denies six counts of variously making fraudulent claims, engaging in misleading commercial practice and unfair commercial practice between 2014 and 2016.
The trial continues.
