Jailed: Mother who held up daughter's severed fingers in court and claimed a 'voodoo curse' made her commit £1m benefit fraud

A £1million benefit fraud who claimed she acted under a voodoo curse – and produced her daughter's severed fingers in court as evidence – was jailed for five years yesterday.

A judge told Remi Fakorede, 46, that her testimony had been 'utterly unbelievable'.

Mother-of-six Fakorede had invented at least five phantom families, some with disabled children, to claim tax credits.

During her three-week trial she claimed her bank accounts had been taken over by a 'voodoo man', whose curse had already killed her mother.

Asked why she did not contact police, she told jurors that when her daughter was a baby, she suffered kidney failure and her fingers dropped off.

She said the voodoo man told her she would suffer the same fate if she exposed the plot.

It was at that point that she reached into her pocket and brought out a piece of tissue containing three little fingers.

DNA tests confirmed that they belonged to her daughter, who is understood to have suffered from gangrene after her kidney failure.

One juror was left in tears by the macabre stunt.

Yesterday, Judge Jacqueline Beech told Fakorede: 'I find you to be a thoroughly dishonest woman. Your conduct in court was a barefaced attempt to manipulate the jury.'

Snaresbrook Crown Court in East London had heard that £500,000 passed through Fakorede's bank accounts during the five-year scam, with a wider crime 'syndicate' linked to Nigeria pocketing £936,933.

Fakorede, who holds British and Nigerian passports, was already receiving an annual income of up to £40,000 from property in Nigeria.

She also ran a hairdressing salon and owned two East London properties worth hundreds of thousands.

But she told housing benefit authorities she was penniless and out of work.

She submitted 39 claims for tax credits, largely for children she had invented, and used a string of stolen National Insurance numbers.

The court heard the handwriting on most of the the false claim forms could be linked to Fakorede, of Hackney, East London, and the cash was paid into an account in her maiden name.

In the only case where she used her own name, she lied about her work and claimed for a child she did not have.

She said she was a single mother, but investigators discovered her husband was still with her, although he has since left.

Judge Beech called the scam, which ran from August 2002 to June last year, 'a wholesale assault on the benefit system'.

She condemned the ease with which Fakorede had been able to carry out the fraud and called for a review of the system which allows benefits to be paid into any bank account.

Fakorede had denied committing fraud, but showed no reaction to the verdict until discussions began about confiscating her assets, when she sank her head into her hands.

Her daughter, Denise Shofolawe- Coker, 21, was jailed for a year for laundering £70,000.

HM Revenue and Customs said later: 'We have put in place vigorous strategies to identify, combat and prevent fraud.

'In 2006-07, HRMC identified organised attacks of £252million. Of this, some £212million was stopped before any money was paid.'