A ‘callous and cold-hearted’ woman who picked up her dead mother’s pension so she could gamble in Las Vegas casinos has pleaded guilty to fraud and other offences in court.

Maria Blacklock, from Maida Vale, forged documents and pretended to be her mother in phone calls during three years of deceit.

The 58-year-old admitted to fraud by false representation and money laundering offences after she was caught by detectives from the City of London Police’s Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department (IFED).

In total, she had wrongly claimed nearly £65,500.

A judge at Inner London Crown Court heard Blacklock, now 58, moved from the UK to Las Vegas with her mother in the mid 2000s.

Her mother received monthly state pension payments and annual annuity payments administered through insurance company Phoenix Group as part of her private pension.

But when Blacklock’s mother died in June 24 2011, she falsified life certificates to make it look as though her mother was still alive and living in Las Vegas instead of informing the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and Phoenix of her death.

She then went on to use her mother’s bank cards and accounts to withdraw and spend the pension money being paid into her account after her death – a total of £31,320 in state pension payments and £35,111 in pension payments from Phoenix.

Called insurance company pretending to be dead mother

The fraud only came to light when she was reported to Phoenix and the DWP by a former friend in September 2014.

Blacklock was arrested in November 2015 at her address, having returned to the UK in September 2013 to look after her ill husband.

During investigations, detectives established Blacklock used her mother’s pension payments to fund her lifestyle and gambling in Las Vegas.

When IFED officers travelled to the Nevada city in March this year to gather statements from Blacklock’s former friends and associates, they discovered the defendant had forged a Las Vegas doctor’s signature on a life certificate completed in her mother’s name and submitted to the DWP.

They also tracked down her mother’s death certificate from the Southern Nevada Health District, confirming that she died in 2011.

The investigators also found Blacklock made over 100 cash withdrawals from her mother’s account at ATMs in three different Las Vegas casinos

Further financial enquiries made back in the UK also found Blacklock had paid for flights to and from Las Vegas using her mother’s bank card and identified large numbers of cash withdrawals from the same account in and around the Maida Vale area where she was living after she returned to the UK.

Phoenix later discovered Blacklock had phoned them pretending to be her mother after she died.

'Gambling away her mother's money'

She was charged in May 2016, and following her guilty pleas, Simon Styles, IFED financial investigator said: “In my 30 years as a police officer and investigator I have never come across an act that was as callous and cold-hearted as this.

"From our enquiries, we saw that at the time immediately prior to and after her mother’s death, Blacklock was at various casinos gambling away her mother’s money.

“She deliberately set out to defraud not only the insurer who was paying her mother’s private pension, but also the DWP and the taxpayer who ultimately picks up the bill for the state pension payments."

Blacklock will be sentenced on September 6.