Serial con artist jailed for seven years over 'cruel' funeral scam

A serial funeral fraudster who conneda grieving family out of £2,600 for a service he had not arranged has been jailed for seven years.

Mark Kerbey, 62, told his unnamed victim the funeralof her late husband had been arranged at Pitsea Crematorium in Essex. This was despite the fact he had not arranged a service at the venue and had been barred from holding funerals at another local crematorium and cemetery.

When the family arrived at Pitsea, they were turned away as no service had been organised. Kerbey then offered to do the funeral at his Trinity Funeral Home in Southend, Essex,. but the large group could not all fit in the venue's 15ft by 15ft room.

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Kerbey, of Westcliff, Essex, was sentenced to seven years and three months in prison on July 25 at Chelmsford Crown Court. He was handed consecutive sentences for two counts of fraud, receiving 3 years and six months on count one and 12 months on count two, reports the Southend Echo.

For two counts of perverting the course of justice, he was handed one sentence of two years and three months, and for the second six months in prison, both to be served consecutively with the sentences for fraud. In total, his jail time is seven years and three months. One of the victims told the court of the "cruel scam" pulled by Kerbey saying they have "had nightmares of my family blaming me for not being able to say a proper goodbye."

The court heard Kerbey had previously booked and taken money from families despite knowing he had been banned from organising funerals in Basildon and Southend since 2018. In January 2020, a woman whose husband had died at Southend Hospital paid for Kerbey to organise the funeral of her husband, under the business 'Trinity Funeral Home'.

However the victim's family did not know that his business had been banned from using the facilities at Bowers Gifford Crematorium and Southend cemetery in any capacity. Kerbey took money from the victim to the value of £2,600 and told the victim and her family the funeral had been arranged for Pitsea Crematorium.

Kerbey was aware that no funeral had been arranged as his attempts to book the service had been rebuked by the crematorium. Despite that, Kerbey visited the family the night before the funeral and presented them with an order of service.

When the congregation arrived at Pitsea Crematorium the following day it became apparent that no funeral had been arranged. When the family contacted Kerbey, he laid the blame on others and told the family they should come to his funeral home for the service.

He also sent a 'wholly inappropriate' limousine to pick up the family which was prepared for use in a 13-year-old girl's birthday on the same day. When the mourning group arrived at the funeral home, they found it was a small 15ft by 15ft room and a large part of the group had to wait outside.

The 20-minute service made little reference to the life of the man who had died. In total, the family then had to pay an extra £700 to Kerbey for the body of their loved one to be released into the care of a new funeral service.

On 17 March 2020, the man was finally laid to rest, but with no family present due to the money which had already been paid out. Following an investigation, Mark Kerbey, 62, of Station Road Westcliff, was charged with two counts of fraud by false representation.

Kerbey has been running funeral firms since the 1980s and spent five years in prison for fraud when the company went bust. Kerbey, who changed his name from Richard Sage in 2011, credits himself on LinkedIn as a Consultant Funeral Director and Air & Road Ambulance Coordinator.

When he left prison in 1989, he set up the Belmont Air and Road Ambulance which cared for American citizens taken ill in Europe until they were well enough to return home. Kerbey was jailed for sevens years after a deal with St Thomas' Hospital in London left the hospital half a million pounds out of pocket.

St Thomas' paid Kerbey, then known as Sage, for each patient and was then supposed to reclaim costs from an insurer in Michigan, US. However the insurance company was set up by Kerbey and was fake.

In the late 2000s, Kerbey purported himself to be an undertaker in Manchester and later Burnley before running the Mary Mayer Funeral Home in Essex. Kerbey was sentenced to 54 months in prison for six fraud offences in 2014 and released in 2017. In May 2018, Kerbey was found guilty of taking more than £3,000 from an innocent retired couple who trusted him with arranging their funerals.