A con artist who scammed 184 holidaymakers out of more than £400,000 has been jailed.
Richard Lester, aged 56, from Luton was sentenced to five years in prison at Chelmsford Crown Court on Tuesday.
He was found guilty of fraudulent trading and concealing criminal property by the court last December, following a decade-long investigation by Essex Police, who were contacted by 324 potential victims all around the world.
Lester, who turned up to court wearing a balaclava, was found guilty of stealing a total of £402,540.29 from people in the UK, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France, Germany and Japan.
Instead of booking holidays for customers of his company, Cruise Direct UK Ltd, police found that he’d gambled their money away online.
In 2009, Lester set up Cruisevoucher, a scheme to sell vouchers to customers who used them to book heavily discounted cruises via his website, up to three years in advance. The money they paid was used by Lester to book cruises for earlier customers who had bought vouchers the same way, in a Ponzi-style scheme.
Lester recruited agents – some of whom were customers – to sell the vouchers in exchange for commission. In 2011, Lester renamed the company Cruisemiles and stopped booking cruises customers had bought, keeping their money for himself.
Some customers only discovered their cruises had not been booked when they turned up at ports, including at Tilbury in Essex, and were turned away by the cruise lines.
Meanwhile Lester, who used several aliases including Lord Lester, Henry Lester, Les Richards, Richie Lescovitch and Barry Williams, was ‘living the high life in Las Vegas’.
His barrister Tania Panagiotopoulou said in his mitigation that there were ‘thousands of satisfied customers’ for years before Lester began spending clients’ money instead.
But Judge Mills said Lester ‘gaslit’ his victims by claiming it was their fault their cruises were cancelled.
“This was a well-planned and complex fraud carried out over a lengthy period of time, and it was done knowingly and willingly on your part,” he told Lester as he handed out the jail term.
