The UK’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) says a fraudster who claimed to be part of MI6 must repay £125,000 ($168,000) to a former love interest that he conned.
Mark Acklom, 52, was described as “a calculating, persistent fraudster” who, in this case, deceived a woman he promised to marry into lending him money for renovations on properties he did not own.
Acklom convinced Carolyn Woods in 2012 that he was both a Swiss investment banker and an MI6 agent, and had celebrity friends with whom he regularly spoke.
In reality, the man was not an international banker, nor was he in espionage, and his fabled friendships with British celebrities such as Chris Evans were allegedly also fabricated.
He also did not have a string of properties in need of renovation. He left Woods penniless.
Acklom pleaded guilty to five counts of fraud worth £300,000 ($403,000) in August 2019, although one woman accusing him of fraud maintained that she was defrauded of much more – a sum closer to the £850,000 ($1.14 million) region.
Acklom was sentenced to five years and eight months’ imprisonment for five counts of fraud totalling £300,000 in August 2019.
The CPS says that after being being extradited from Switzerland in 2019, he admitted five charges. The service said in a statement at the weekend that Acklom had been freed from a Spanish jail last year, after being extradited at the end of his UK sentence.
Assembling last week at Bristol Crown Court following a series of hearings, lawyers agreed that Acklom’s total fraud was worth £710,000 ($953,000), and that the romance scammer must repay £125,000 – the sum of his estimated total assets – within three months or face an additional two years in UK prison.
According to the BBC, Judge Martin Picton said that the likelihood of Acklom repaying that money was slim, and that the victim could take solace in the idea that Acklom would probably never return to the UK, given the punishments involved with doing so.
Andrew Kerrigan, specialist prosecutor at the CPS said: “Mark Acklom was a calculating, persistent fraudster who exploited a victim into believing that he was involved in foreign espionage and was a wealthy banker and needed loans to fund property renovation work on his string of properties. But this was simply not true, and he acted in a calculated and premeditated manner, which led to the victim’s total financial ruin.
“We continue to pursue the proceeds of crime robustly and identify his available assets. We are determined to disrupt and deter fraudsters like Acklom.”
Kerrigan claimed that the CPS had recovered more than £478 million from crims in the last five years and had returned £95 million of that to victims.
Where in the world?
The fraudster’s exact movements are not fully understood, but he is known to have moved between the UK, Switzerland, and Spain throughout his life.
According to a Sky documentary over which Acklom launched [PDF] a complaint, he moved back to the UK in 2011 after spending an unknown period of time in Geneva, and he met Woods a year later in 2012.
Between 18 January and 7 July, 2012, Acklom convinced Woods to approve five loans of varying sizes to him, between £30,000 and £120,000 each, per the facts of his 2019 guilty plea.
After fleeing Woods, Sky News tracked Acklom to Spain, where he was imprisoned for fraud in 2015, before being released early in March 2016 and disappearing again.
He disappeared at some point between being released in Spain and the UK’s Somerset and Avon police securing a European arrest warrant for him in June. By October, the National Crime Agency added Acklom to its ten most-wanted fugitives list.
Acklom was later sighted in Geneva in June 2017.
He was extradited to the UK from Switzerland in 2019, however, after which time he pleaded guilty to some of the charges against Woods and served prison time.
The CPS said he was freed from a Spanish prison last year after being extradited there at the end of his UK sentence. ®