Family who fleeced elderly must pay £413,000

David Price and his relatives lived on a caravan site in Brigg, North Lincolnshire, but travelled across Yorkshire and beyond, convincing hundreds of vulnerable people to part with cash for gardening or roofing which was unnecessary and often left unfinished.

Yesterday five members of the Price family and their associate James Cunningham were made the subject of a confiscation order during a hearing at Teesside Crown Court which heard they had profited by £1.3m from their crimes.

Between them they were ordered to pay back a total of £413,948, with David Price snr ordered to pay £368,350.

During their trial in 2011 Teesside Crown Court heard how they carried out a “pitiless search for different ways of fleecing old people” during a five-year campaign.

One lady paid the gang more than £52,000 for roofing work between January 2008 and February 2009. An 85-year-old woman living alone paid the Prices and Cunningham £14,400 in total between 2007 and 2009 for work which, according to a surveyor, would normally have cost £25 plus VAT.

An 18-month investigation by North Yorkshire County Council’s trading standards officer revealed the lengths to which the gang would go to press their victims, some in their 90s, many suffering from dementia, to pay for work which was rarely ever done.

Speaking afterwards David Bowe, the council’s director of business and environmental services said: “The Proceeds of Crime Act is an extremely valuable tool which is available to us and the courts to ensure that crime does not pay and that victims in cases such as this get their hard earned savings back.”

In 2011, Price snr, then aged 42, who admitted conspiracy to defraud, theft, and money laundering offences, was jailed for seven years and eight months.

His sons Abraham, then 20, and David Jr, aged 19 at the time, were locked up for three years and eight months and three years and four months respectively for conspiracy to defraud and money laundering offences.

Price’s wife Angelina, then 40, was jailed for 16 months for converting criminal property. His brother Shane, then 41, received three years and four months for conspiracy to defraud and money laundering. Cunningham, then 26, from Castleford, was jailed for five years and four months after admitting conspiracy to defraud, burglary with intent to steal, and money laundering offences