A notorious fraudster who scammed a woman out of her life savings while posing as an MI6 agent and a Swiss banker has been ordered to repay her £125,000.
Investigators have spent more than five years trying to claw back the money Mark Acklom, 52, stole from Carolyn Woods.
Acklom, who was sentenced to more than five years in prison after admitting five counts of fraud against Ms Woods in 2019, now lives in Spain and is married with two children.
Bristol Crown Court heard it is unlikely he will actually hand over the money, but the order will effectively prevent him from ever returning to the UK for fear of the consequences.
Acklom appeared to be in attendance remotely during a Proceeds of Crime Act (Poca) hearing on Friday but did not switch on his camera or speak.
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Prosecutor John Hardy KC told the court Acklom benefited to the tune of £710,000 from his crimes, but the amount available to repay was £125,000.
Judge Martin Picton said: ‘At the heart of the case is a victim who has lost a very, very great deal of money.
‘Carolyn Woods was drawn into the web of fantasy and deceit.’
The judge said that Acklom ‘was determined to bleed her dry’ and exercised ‘quite extraordinary powers as a conman’.
Judge Picton added that he has the ‘greatest doubts’ that the money will be recovered, but said that Acklom will effectively be unable to return to the UK because he will fear the consequences of prison time if he does.
During his relationship with Ms Woods, Acklom claimed he was friends with celebrities including Nicky Clarke and Chris Evans, had spoken to Hillary Clinton and knew fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, and was involved with secret MI6 missions.
Acklom duped Ms Woods into lending him her life savings by misleading her into thinking they were in a ‘committed relationship’ despite him already being married.
The conman – using the alias of Mark Conway – accepted a marriage proposal from Ms Woods in February 2012, just one month after they met in a boutique in Tetbury where she worked.
He duped her into lending him £299,564 of her life savings in 2012 for renovation work at a number of properties in Bath, Somerset, as well as to buy a Porsche and rent a Georgian manor in the city.
He later left the country and was named as one of the UK’s most wanted fugitives as part of Operation Captura, a multi-agency initiative involving the National Crime Agency and Crimestoppers to track down British fugitives abroad.
The serial conman was later tracked down to Switzerland and extradited back to Britain in 2019, when he was jailed.
When he was sentenced that year, Ms Woods, a divorced mother of two, said she suffered ‘total financial ruin’ and had been hounded by debt collection agencies after cashing in her pension and using savings to pay her bills.
In a victim impact statement at the time, Ms Woods said she suffered with post-traumatic stress disorder, calling Acklom’s crimes an ‘act of the utmost cruelty, designed to destroy my life for his personal gain’.
Acklom was extradited to Spain in 2021 – having fled the country in 2016 midway through a fraud sentence – and served a further two years in prison before his release in 2023.
In 1991, Acklom, then aged 16, received a four-year custodial sentence for a £466,000 mortgage fraud after he posed as a City stockbroker.
He also spent £11,000 after stealing his father’s credit card, swindled a former teacher out of £13,000 and ran up a £34,000 bill with a private charter jet company.
Andrew Kerrigan, specialist prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service, 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.’
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