SCAMMERS who helped drivers escape penalties for speeding tickets could have cost innocent people their licences and even their jobs.
Jason Sallis and Sarah Beddow were finally caught after the large number of speeders supposedly living at the same address in Leamington was spotted.
Sallis, 47, of Blondvil Street, Coventry, and Beddow, 32, of Jubilee Fields, Stockton, near Southam, both pleaded guilty at Warwick Crown Court to conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
Sallis, who only entered his pleas on the day of his trial, was jailed for three years.
But mother-of-two Beddow, who had pleaded guilty more than a year ago, was given a 15-month sentence suspended for 12 months and ordered to do 150 hours of unpaid work.
Prosecutor Philip Brunt said notices of intended prosecution were sent to the registered keepers of cars caught speeding, and in each case they were returned naming another person as the driver.
He explained no fewer than 38 speeding offences committed in Warwickshire, the West Midlands, and as far apart as Surrey and West Yorkshire, supposedly involved drivers living at the multi-occupancy house in Dale Street.
So a notice was then sent to that person at the Dale Street address, and in some cases there was no reply, but in others the notice was returned agreeing they were the offender.
But the names being falsely entered were real people who, as a result of the scam, ended up being fined and having penalty points on their licences.
The protestations of people who had been falsely named led the police to realise they all supposedly lived at the address in Dale Street.
And checks on 38 notices which had given that address revealed Sallis’s fingerprints on 16 of them, and Beddow’s prints on four.
Mr Brunt said Sallis was charging £150 a time to make the speeding offences ‘go away,’ while Beddow’s role was to refer people who had been caught speeding to him.
Ian Windridge, defending said Sallis had become involved when he had a speeding ticket and was put in touch with someone he referred to as SP, after which he began doing it himself.
John Evans, for Beddow, said it was known Sallis was able to deal with tickets, and she had become ‘a route through which people could make those enquiries’.
Judge Sylvia de Bertodano, speaking of the innocent motorists who ended up with points on their licences, said: “They felt completely helpless. They were stuck in a Kafkaesque nightmare where no-one believed them, and they were in danger of losing their driving licences which in some cases were their livelihoods.”
