London - An online dating fraudster who posed as a spy and a shipping magnate to swindle single women out of £105,000 (close to R1,9m) was jailed for more than five years on Monday.
Zac Langley, 41, signed up to dating website Plenty of Fish and pretended to be a variety of exciting characters to attract, woo and ensare women.
His victims quickly became smitten with the charming conman and agreed to hand over large sums believing he would repay them with his supposed riches.
Bournemouth Crown Court heard that Langley – whose real name is Andrew Penfold – contacted his victims four days after his release from prison for similar offences. He has variously posed as a banker, an MI5 spy, director of a £400 million microchip firm, a millionaire wine merchant, a radar maker, a journalist and a lord.
Claire Cooper, 34, and her mother Muriel, 60, helped Langley buy two luxury Range Rovers and parted with almost £20,000 for bogus medical fees, including £13,500 he said was for an aunt with terminal cancer.
Fraudster Zac Langley from Poole's been jailed for 5 and a half years, for conning women he met on dating website Plenty of Fish #HeartNews pic.twitter.com/Fe1LksCGxh
— Heart South News (@HeartSouthNews) November 14, 2016
At the same time he started seeing Danielle Allen who was tricked into signing a finance deal for a £31,000 Mercedes.
There was also a £2,000 weekend stay in Bath after he proposed to her and promised to build a £4 million family home for them. He reimbursed the single mother using money scammed from the Coopers, while she left her job as an Ordnance Survey marketing executive on his assurance that he would take care of her and her daughter.
Twice Langley used a forged email from tax giants KPMG to trick estate agents into thinking he had a £50 million property portfolio so he could buy two £750,000 homes. Cooper, a former Army nurse, and her mother contributed £32,000 each to the venture having been duped by the faked email.
The Coopers lost £103,000 to Langley’s scams while Allen ended up almost £2,000 out of pocket.
Prosecutor Stuart Ellacott told the court how Langley, from Poole, Dorset, contacted Miss Cooper through Plenty of Fish on December 14 last year, meeting her in Bournemouth on December 18.
The court heard he told her he was an intelligence officer with the Royal Marines, owned two properties on the exclusive Sandbanks peninsula at Poole and had shares in a family shipping business in Southampton.
Langley was described as a serial fraudster with 20 aliases and a string of 12 convictions for 74 fraud-related offences dating back to May 2000. He was caught when he tried to create his own property company and detectives from Dorset Police’s fraud department traced his actions.
Langley was jailed for five years and six months after earlier pleading guilty to five counts of fraud and eight breaches of a court order that banned him from offending again.
He refused to attend sentencing on Monday, saying he was too ashamed of what he had done.
Judge Jonathan Fuller said: ‘This defendant is quite rightly described as a serial fraudster. There was significant planning and consideration to the contrivances he was going to deploy. His victims were vulnerable because of their positions in life, and it is clear he targeted these kinds of people on the dating website.
‘I’m told he is remorseful and ashamed. I have serious reservations about that. He is a cynical manipulator and a confidence trickster. He is a thoroughly dishonest individual.’
Fraud investigator Paul Sullivan, of Dorset Police, said: ‘Zac Langley preys on his victims’ emotions for his own personal financial gain. They have been left emotionally and financially shattered by his cruel and selfish actions.’
Daily Mail