Bitcoin fraudsters made so much money they handed out £5,000 gift cards to people in the street and bought cars for people they met in the pub.
Four criminals at the centre of the £22 million conspiracy have now been sentenced to a combined total of 15 years in prison.
They worked with ringleader James Parker, who masterminded the scam from his home in Blackpool but died in 2021 before he could be brought to justice.
Between October 2017 and January 2018 the group exploited a loophole to siphon off more than £20 million from Parker’s trading account on an Australian-based cryptocurrency exchange.
Parker’s corrupt financial adviser Stephen William Boys, nicknamed ‘Rodney’ after the Only Fools and Horses character, helped launder the stolen funds.
The scam made so much money that £5,000 gift cards were handed out to people in the street and cars were bought for people Parker met in the pub, Preston Crown Court heard.
During the trial Boys told the court how he took £1 million cash in a suitcase to buy a villa from Russians he met in the back office of an estate agent and paid £60,000 to pay off corrupt officials so he could carry on laundering money.
During the investigation police recovered 445 Bitcoin, then worth £22m, along with luxury watches, houses, cars and designer goods, plus more than £1 million in bank accounts.
Boys worked with a UK national based in Dubai to convert the cryptocurrency into cash. It was then laundered through various foreign based online accounts.
Det Sgt David Wainwright, of Lancashire Police’s Fraud Unit, said: “The scale of the fraud in this case is absolutely staggering and led to the suspects literally having more money than they could spend.
A Crown Prosecution Service spokesman said: “A very significant amount of the laundered assets have been returned or are in the process of being recovered on the behalf of the Australian cryptocurrency exchange.”
Prosecutor Jonathan Kelleher added: “These offenders used the internet from the comfort of their own homes to obtain tens of millions of pounds worth of Bitcoin which did not belong to them.”
Boys, 59, of Clayton-le-Moors, was found guilty of converting and transferring criminal property and jailed for six years.
Kelly Caton, 45, of Blackpool, was found guilty of fraud and converting and acquiring criminal property and jailed for four-and-a-half years
Jordan Kane Robinson, 24, of Fleetwood, was found guilty of fraud and converting and acquiring criminal property and also jailed for four-and-a-half years.
James Austin-Beddoes, 28, of ytham, was found guilty of fraud and acquiring criminal property. He pleaded guilty to converting criminal property earlier and was jailed for 18 months, suspended for one year.
