A fraudster was ordered to pay up £1,250 last week after he used a dead woman's disabled badge to park for free.
Charanjeev Singh Virdee, of Fairview Crescent, Rayners Lane, used the badge across London, after finding it in the optician's he owns in Ladbroke Grove.
It is believed the 32-year-old escaped up to £13,000 a year in parking fees by using the disabled bays outside his work.
Officers from Kensington and Chelsea Council questioned Virdee after a surveillance operation and he said the badge was his aunt's and that he had dropped her off in Portobello Road that morning.
Later, after he had been seen using the badge outside his work place on at least two other occasions, he told officers he had panicked and lied.
He appeared at West London Magistrates' Court where was fined a total of £750 for using the badge and for changing the expiry date from 2004 to 2009.
He was also ordered to pay costs of £500.
Angela Dias, chief executive of Harrow Association of Disabled People, said: "Blue badge fraud is completely unacceptable as it then diminishes the number of accessible parking spaces available to people who really do need them.
"Accessible parking is, for some disabled people, the only way they can access their local community, and I think £750 is an extremely lenient fine for depriving another person of that freedom."
A Harrow Police spokesman confirmed theft of blue badges had occurred regularly over the past year, with 31 having been stolen in the last 12 months.
The majority were taken from the dashboards of cars but there has also been one taken during a robbery and another in a burglary.
