Pet Shop Conman You've Been Scammed

Millions of us are targeted in scams every year.

And whether it comes in the form of an e-mail, a cold call or a knock at the door,

they're all designed to do one thing and one thing only -

to get you to part with your cash.

Coming up... a scam that deprived an elderly man

of his home and his business.

I was disgusted at what he'd done to me.

And the rogue landlord whose money grabbing exploits left

scores of innocent people in financial ruin.

I just felt like going up Beachy Head

and jumping off it, to be honest.

Well, I'm here to tell you what the conman doesn't want you to know,

how to stay one step ahead of the game and not get scammed.

It may be a bit corny, but it's true.

To be truly rich you need more than money and a big house,

you need friends and family, people that are close to you.

And the cruellest scams are the ones that take advantage of that fact.

These scams are breathtakingly callous.

Known as inveigling, they involve worming your way into someone's

life and affections with the sole aim of getting at their cash.

And they often prey on elderly,

lonely people who don't have family and friends around them.

The victims give themselves so wholeheartedly towards the scammer

and that trust is broken, then I would suggest they'll find it

very hard to trust anybody ever again.

I'm about to meet a man who was taken for everything

he had by someone he considered more than a close friend, almost family.

Albert is a 77-year-old pensioner who lives in Derby.

He was approached by a scammer in 2006 and the events that

followed had a truly devastating effect on his life and his finances.

Hello there. You must be Albert.

Nice to meet you.

-Shall I come on in?

-I THINK I can let you in!

-THEY LAUGH

-Thank you very much.

Albert has lived on his own for the past 18 years,

but it's not the old age he'd envisaged.

Having been married with children,

Albert divorced in the early '70s and moved to Derby to start afresh.

He met his second partner and moved in with her,

but a decade later tragedy struck.

How long did that last?

It lasted until...1984...

and then she developed breast cancer and died.

Having suffered two lots of heartache,

Albert threw himself into his work running a pet shop.

Yet he knew that at some point he'd have to retire

and he was facing a lonely future.

Then something happened that seemed to offer a way of avoiding this.

It began when a young man called Jamie called into Albert's shop.

Tell me about the day that Jamie walked through the door.

He's looking for someone who sells wild bird seed.

I said yes I've got some...

We got chatting, he was a friendly lad... he had a bookshop,

he was educated at Repton College.

Did he tell you all this the first time you met him?

Yes, yeah, he was quite friendly.

A scam like this begins by the offender gaining

the trust of the victim.

He's able to be very flexible in the lies and the stories that he tells.

Jamie also told Albert that his parents had been

killed in a tragic helicopter crash and that he himself suffered

from a kidney complaint that required daily dialysis treatment.

Did you think it was strange that someone would

share so much with you so readily on a first meeting?

To a certain extent yes,

but then again I thought he was just trying to be friendly.

Having apparently bared his heart

and soul to Albert, Jamie then turned the tables

and tried to find out as much as he could about Albert.

Conmen look to get as much personal information as they can

about their victims. They'll be keen to know

what their interests are, where they live, what their habits are...

The information that the scammer gets about the victim will

assist him in making up lies, making up cover stories as to how

he's going to extract money and property.

Jamie quickly discovered that Albert had a house nearby

and that he lived alone and didn't have any family.

He then began the process of worming his way into Albert's life.

He said, "How do you get to work?"

And I said, "I walk up in the morning and walk back at night."

And he said, "If I'm in the village at all I'll give you a call

"and take you one way or the other," which he did.

And when he couldn't pick him up, Jamie even laid on taxis,

which he paid for, to take Albert to or from work.

Did you ever ask yourself why is he doing this?

No, I just thought it was his personality to be like that.

I thought he was a decent lad.

But in fact he was anything but decent.

Unbeknown to Albert, he was actually a con artist called

Sean O'Farrell, who had sensed Albert's loneliness and deliberately

stepped into the void that Albert's family had left behind.

But for now Albert knew him as Jamie.

And he was ready for the next stage of the scam.

Once they've gone through the grooming process,

the scammer's next move would be to test the water in terms of

whether the victim is prepared to hand over money or property.

And Jamie had an interesting way of going about this.

He asked me if I'd be interested in moving over to Nottingham to live with him.

A lot of people would say, hold on, that's maybe a step too far.

You know, friendship is one thing, but this is something else.

Yeah, it's possible, it's possible.

How did you make sense of it in your own mind?

I thought it was a decent thing to do.

Deliberately exploiting Albert's fear of loneliness,

Jamie told him he'd found a house to buy where they could go

and live as friends and housemates.

Attracted by the idea of friendship

and having someone to look after him in his old age, Albert said yes.

And it was then that Jamie made his first mention of money.

He said he needed £70,000 towards the purchase of the house.

And guess who he asked to stump up the cash?

I said I would get it out the bank for him.

-So you got out the full 70,000.

-Yeah.

After years of living alone with no close family around him,

Albert now believed he was about to start a new life with someone

he had begun to view almost as a surrogate son.

And now that Jamie had promised him a rosy future together,

he began the process of extracting more money from him.

Once the victim believes there's going to be

a long-term future in their relationship with the scammer

then it would make their position a lot more relaxed

and comfortable, it would make the scammer a lot more able to

take money and possessions away from the victim.

Jamie encouraged Albert to put his own house on the market.

I owned my own house,

so there was nothing stopping me from selling that.

He also encouraged him to sell his pet shop.

I'd done 18, 20 years at the shop,

so there was no reason to hang onto that.

And he found a flat for Albert to live in, which he said he would pay

for, while they were waiting for the house in Nottingham to be done up.

The scammer will deal with all the arrangements.

In that way he will appear to be a lot more reassuring

and in control from the victim's point of view.

When the sale of Albert's house went through,

Jamie even laid on transport to help him move.

He took all the furniture in three loads using his own transit van.

He was going to take it over to put in storage before we moved

into the house at Mapperley which wasn't quite ready.

Albert had now sold his house and his business,

so he had over £300,000 in the bank,

but Jamie now needed to find a way to get his hands on it.

And here he played on Albert's own fears.

Albert had been told by his bank that any money

he had in his account over £85,000 would not be insured

if the bank ran into financial difficulties,

so he should take some of it out and spread it across other accounts.

But Jamie told him he had a better plan.

He could store the money in a safe in his house.

The safe was underground,

he said it was safe enough in that area,

they didn't have robberies up there.

But the building society where Albert kept his money would

only allow him to withdraw £5,000 a day.

So every day over a period of several months

Albert withdrew £5,000.

And every day Jamie turned up to collect it.

-The trust that you're placing in him there is phenomenal.

-Yeah.

So well will this victim have been groomed that he will be

absolutely convinced that the money that he's giving over is not

only for the right reasons but they will trust the scammer implicitly.

Jamie carried on taking the money

until he had emptied Albert's account,

all the while reassuring him

with tales of the wonderful future that lay in store for them.

And even when the account was empty, he wasn't done. He still asked for more.

At this point Albert finally smelt a rat.

There was no reason for him to want any more money,

he was sitting on that large amount of mine.

So Albert refused to hand over any more money.

And what happened next was predictable, but still heartbreaking.

He just simply disappeared.

Jamie had scarpered with nearly £400,000 of Albert's life savings,

leaving Albert in a rented flat with no money

and a very uncertain future.

What went through your mind when you'd worked it out?

Well, I was disgusted at what he'd done to me.

Albert called the police,

who conducted a search for Jamie Milliman.

They were unable to find anyone under that name.

It seemed as though the fraudster had vanished into thin air.

Resigned to the fact that Jamie might never be brought to justice,

Albert tried to get on with his life.

But then, almost two years after the scammer had disappeared,

he made a startling discovery in the local newspaper.

As you opened that newspaper can you tell me what it said inside?

It gave a photograph of him, saying that he'd conned these people.

Sean O'Farrell had been up to his old tricks again,

but this time he'd been caught.

And of course the police had been unable to find him first time round

because he'd been going under the fake name of Jamie Milliman.

Albert got straight on the phone to the investigating officer who

was named in the article, Detective Constable Steve Fuller.

At the time that Albert reported the offence to the police, O'Farrell was already serving a sentence.

He was in prison serving six years eight months for almost

identical crimes.

DC Fuller took a statement from Albert

and confirmed that the Jamie Milliman who had fleeced Albert

for every penny he was worth was indeed Sean O'Farrell,

the conman who had scammed four other victims out of their life savings.

But in prison, there was nowhere left to hide.

O'Farrell was charged with four offences -

he was charged with stealing the money,

almost £400,000,

stealing all the personal possessions from Albert's home,

stealing the possessions from his business and he was also charged

in connection with the rented property that O'Farrell moved Albert into.

Sean O'Farrell was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison,

to be served concurrently with his other sentence.

It's small comfort though for Albert, who has lost his house,

his business, his life savings and is now living on benefits.

I hope you're not blaming yourself hugely for what's happened.

No. I just blame myself for being a fool for going on as long as I did do.

But you were on your own for such a long time without the family that

you'd expected to have into your old age.

In a sense it feels like he stepped in to fill that gap.

Yeah, that's true.

Would it be fair to say he's like a son?

-Would that be fair?

-Yep. Yep.

I'm really sorry that it's happened to you.

That's all right, son, it's OK.

I hope that people can see this, can watch this and they can see

-how it can happen.

-Yeah.

And hopefully prevent it happening to somebody else...

with another conman.

If you or a friend or neighbour are concerned about these sort of scams

you can find more information at bbc.co.uk/scammed

With house prices high and mortgages hard to come by, more and more people are renting.

And when you're renting, what you really need is a good, trustworthy landlord.

Unfortunately not all landlords are trustworthy and some are downright dishonest,

taking advantage of people's needs for a roof over their heads

in order to con them out of large sums of money.

He'd take the deposit and eight month's rent in advance with no intention of them staying there.

Thousands of people fall victim to rogue landlords each year

and the effects can be devastating.

I just lost every penny I had.

I just felt like going up Beachy Head

and jumping off it to be honest.

In September 2010 Eastbourne Police were alerted to a fraudster

called Paul Ridden who seemed to have been

involved in a series of property scams.

Over a period of about a year, he managed to con or take money

out of probably between 20 and 50 victims in excess of £50,000.

DC Erika Owen was the officer charged with investigating the case,

which came to her attention in a very strange manner.

In September 2010, Paul Ridden handed himself into Eastbourne

police station and said he wanted to confess to committing fraud.

OK, that's a new one on me, a conman who hands himself in.

Why would he have done that?

I think because too many people were after him in Eastbourne,

he said, "It's a small town and they'll soon catch up with me."

He said, "I can't carry on any more, I need to come here and be put into prison."

He may have handed himself in,

but the police still needed to investigate

and began building up a picture of what Ridden had been up to.

Through questioning it emerged that he had started out

as a bona fide lettings agent but had then got greedy.

What he started doing was taking money from the tenants

and then not giving it to the owners of the property,

so he'd say, "The tenant hasn't paid, I'll make sure I get it off them and get it for you,"

and constantly blame the tenant.

But it was about to become clear that stealing rent money

was just the tip of the iceberg.

Ridden had given DC Owen a notebook with details of all his victims,

and as she began contacting them,

the full extent of his crimes began to emerge.

One of the people DC Owen spoke to

was Paul Ridden's own landlady, Dawn Templeton,

who had become concerned when he hadn't paid his rent.

I contacted him to be told that he was paying a cheque into my account

and bear with him, cos he was having cash flow problems.

That cheque actually bounced three times and when the bank

sent it to me, it was actually in the name of a lady I've never heard of.

Smelling a rat, Dawn went round to the property in Eastbourne in search of Paul Ridden.

She was in for a nasty shock.

My neighbours immediately next door said that there was a lady

living in the house. So I decided to put a note through the door to say

I am the owner of this property, can you please contact me immediately.

That evening a lady contacted me and to my horror

I found out that...he had sublet the property illegally to her.

Another victim was Sally Elliot,

who believed that Ridden was her landlord.

I was just sitting there in a state of total shock.

Sally had first come into contact with Ridden

when she was looking for a room to rent.

I needed to get out, because where I was living wasn't very nice,

and a friend at work had rented a room off Paul. He gave me the number,

I phoned him up, he took me round, showed me this beautiful flat.

Ridden told Sally that the flat was his and that he was living there,

but that he had a spare room he could rent to Sally.

Sally agreed and moved in a few weeks later.

Initially everything seemed hunky dory.

I'd finally got out of the horrible place I was living in.

I was going somewhere clean, tidy and I thought brilliant,

basically - things were looking up.

And Paul seemed like the perfect flatmate.

I just thought he was an all-round nice guy, someone who's going to probably become a friend.

And Ridden did seem to have Sally's interests at heart.

She had spoken to him about her dream of one day owning her own property,

and he came to her soon after she moved in with a proposition.

He told her he had access to a whole load of repossessed properties

and that he could get one for her on the cheap.

He said, "If you want to move quickly

"I can set up the mortgage, pay a deposit, pay for a valuation

"on the property as well, then you can be there straight away."

He also suggested she buy a second property which she could rent out and eventually sell.

Sally asked to see the properties that she'd be buying,

so Paul took her to see a two-bedroom flat.

It just needed a bit of tidying up, but a complete kitchen,

parking outside and I just thought it was a lovely flat.

Unbeknown to Sally, Paul Ridden had no connection with this flat.

He had simply befriended the estate agent in order to get hold of the keys.

He was able to gain their trust by saying, "I need to go and look round a property for a potential client,

"you just give me the keys, don't worry about coming with me, you stay in the office."

And he'd built up that much of a rapport that they trusted him

with the keys.

But Sally was of course oblivious to this, and having seen one of

the flats and been seduced by the idea

of getting onto the property ladder,

she agreed to hand over £4,000 to cover mortgage fees and surveys.

I managed to raise the money by pumping up my credit cards to the

limit and then eventually selling my pride and joy, my motorbike.

Sally believed she was now well on her way to owning her own property.

And Paul Ridden was the man who'd made it all possible.

I basically thought he was my best friend who was helping me out,

getting me on the property market.

She had no idea that the man she considered to be her best friend

was in fact a conman.

But when Sally spoke to DC Owen, she was told the shocking news

that Paul Ridden had been arrested.

And when Sally told her about the money she'd handed over for mortgages and surveys,

she was told that she - like many others -

had been the victim of a fraud.

It took me quite a while to get over the shock and try and sort it out

in my head. I'd just lost every penny I had.

In total, Sally had handed over £6,000 to Paul Ridden

and she was now seriously in debt.

But DC Owen was determined to make Ridden pay for his actions.

She had issued a press release in the local area to see if there were

other people who'd had dealings with Ridden, and the response was huge.

I used to come to work and I'd have lists and lists of e-mails - all

saying "Paul Ridden owes me money," "Paul Ridden owes me money."

And as more complaints came in, the police heard more techniques

that Ridden had used to fleece his victims.

He used his position of trust as a property rental agent

to pose as a landlord,

and he would show people around properties that weren't up for rent.

They weren't up for rent because there were people

already living in them. But this didn't stop Ridden.

He'd show them round the property and then take their deposit

and a month's rent in advance, give them a tenancy agreement

and tell them that they could move in.

Unbeknown to them they were never going to move in, and he had no intention of giving back their money.

It seemed that no-one was immune to Ridden's scams.

He's got no conscience whatsoever and he wouldn't mind

if you were his girlfriend, his best friend, his lifelong friend,

he would take money from them.

After turning himself in, Ridden had been released on bail

and he'd promptly checked himself into a psychiatric ward,

claiming to be suffering from depression.

Astonishingly,

while he was there, he even tried to scam his fellow patients.

He had befriended them and gone into their life and become invaluable.

Particularly one of them... he helped her with everything,

he drove her places,

he went out of his way to get her trust. And just at the beginning of

the year he had managed to persuade her to part with a lot of money.

A lot of money is £35,000.

The Ridden disappeared.

He had been told to return to Eastbourne police station

for charging in April 2011, but he never turned up.

And the police were unable to track him down.

DC Owen put out another press release to see if anybody knew of his whereabouts,

and a couple of months later she got a call from a woman saying she'd seen him in Thailand.

She said that she had met Paul Ridden and that everyone was talking

about him because he was making promises that he wasn't keeping.

She came back to England...and found out that he was wanted by myself

and she called me directly and said, "I think I know where your man is."

DC Owen immediately contacted the Thai police

and arranged for Paul Ridden to be deported to England.

He was then flown from Phuket to Bangkok, escorted by officers,

and he was then put on a plane to Heathrow where I met him

at the airport and arrested him.

Paul Ridden was finally behind bars,

after a year-long investigation that had involved scores of victims

and gone halfway across the world and back.

Ridden was charged with fraud and theft and jailed for four years.

This was a great result...and I think it was fit for what he did.

There were many, many, many victims waiting for him to be caught

and put behind bars and they got the sentence that they wanted.

Well, before we go, there's just time to tell you about some of the latest scams out there.

I've come to meet an expert from Trading Standards to get the lowdown

on what you should be looking out for.

Today we're looking at a scam that targets this great nation of pet lovers.

When it comes to animals, people tend to react emotionally rather than rationally,

-so I imagine there must be a scam out there for them.

-Absolutely.

There was one that we know that involves dogs or puppies

from overseas, particularly pedigree puppies.

What happens is that people in this country come across an advert on a website

and understand they're in need of a good home.

And these are being offered for free, potentially.

They're making an emotional plea that these dogs will effectively be maltreated or put down overseas,

and you have a chance to save their life.

What happens then when you get in contact?

You'll have a dialogue with the owner of the dog,

and he will send you a notification typically that the animal is on its way.

And then what happens, you'll get an e-mail from someone claiming to be Customs,

saying, "We've impounded your animal and it can follow its journey to you,

"providing you just pay a small fee for the courier charge."

So you're picturing a puppy in a cage in a warehouse somewhere.

And you're its saviour.

You're going to hand over the cash.

That's exactly right. It's a classic case of the heart ruling the head.

But you guessed it, there is no puppy,

just a scammer preying on your good nature.

If you do want a puppy, there are plenty of rescue centres

around the country who have dogs just waiting for a good home.

Fraudsters will forever be coming up with new ways to get you to part with your cash.

But armed with a little bit of knowledge, you can be one step ahead of them.

Stay safe. I'll see you next time.

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