Clint Canning
(Picture: City of London Police )A fraudster who ran a £2.7million investment scam has been jailed for nine years.
Clint Canning, 45, of Barnston, Dunmow, was found guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud at Southwark Crown Court on December 15.
On Friday, he was sentenced to nine years imprisonment after he took £2,717,590 from his victims who were mostly over the age of 50.
One investor was convinced to invest more than £99,000 to increase their post-retirement income and received no investment in return.
In total, 156 people were targeted in a scam where Canning would cold call his victims in order to convince them to invest in his company.
Detective inspector Gareth Dothie, from the fraud operations team at the City of London Police, said: “This has been a lengthy and complex investigation and we are glad that Canning has been brought to justice for his crimes.
“Canning, who uses a number of aliases including Christian Beauchamp and Clint Foster, was previously convicted for fraud and had a lifetime ban from being a director of a company.
“He has shown himself to be a career criminal and in this instance worked alongside his wife, Eleise Wallace, to defraud people and spend innocent victims’ money on their own lifestyle.
“We hope that the sentence handed down by the court today goes some way to help the victims rebuild their lives.”
Canning’s wife, Eleise Wallace, 37, of Barnston, Dunmow, was found guilty of money laundering at Southwark Crown Court on December 15 .
She was sentenced to two years imprisonment suspended for two years, ordered to carry out 180 hours of unpaid work and handed a rehabilitation order of 15 days at the same court on Friday.
Wallace was also disqualified from being a company director for five years.
Canning, named as Clint Foster at the time, helped set up a company Base2Trade which focused on binary options - a form of fixed odd betting.
Typically a trade involves predicting whether an event will happen or not and the outcome is either yes or no. If the investor is correct, they ‘win’ and should see a return on their investment and if they’re wrong, they lose their full investment.
The company stated investors would have a realistic earning potential of between £1,126 to £2,250 profit per week, with an 88.3 per cent success rate.
Once victims had made an initial investment payment, they were given a username and password for an online trading platform which was claimed to show which trades which were being made.
But in reality, the investments were faked, the platform displayed fictitious results and there was no evidence to suggest that the trades were ever placed.
While Canning was in control of the company, the money went directly into his wife’s account.
The company was shut down in 2015 and Canning was arrested in February 2016.
Wallace attended Bishopsgate Police Station in March 2019.
