Victim of serial fraudster Mark Acklom demands £750k back from bank he used
A woman left penniless by notorious conman Mark Acklom is demanding her stolen money back from the High Street bank he used to fleece her.
During the police investigation, detectives arrested a Barclays bank employee and a former staff member on suspicion of a conspiracy. They had worked in the same department at Barclays.
The two – a man and a woman – were questioned and released on bail for many weeks, though they were later freed without charge.
Carolyn Woods was duped in a romance scam by serial fraudster Acklom, who wooed her and promised to marry her, telling her he was a wealthy Swiss banker called Mark Conway and a secret MI6 agent.
He was jailed four years ago and is now free, but she’s not got back any of the £750,000 she lost.
Carolyn Woods was cheated out of all her savings
Ms Woods said: “I put my faith in the criminal justice system, but it has failed me. It just works in favour of the criminal and really doesn’t give much consideration to the victim at all.
“Acklom’s out now, no doubt living well and up to his old tricks and I’m struggling to survive. I should have explored what happened at the bank at the time, but the police advised me not to. They said it was all in their system.”
Read more:
Conman: The life and crimes of Mark Acklom
Acklom isolated Ms Woods from family and friends, then advised her to set up a new bank account with Barclays.
Citing a cash flow problem, he encouraged her to transfer money she thought were loans for building work on a plush home he had bought them.
Within a couple of months in 2012, under Acklom’s coercive control, she transferred all the money in big, sometimes daily, payments of up to £30,000 into the personal account of one of Acklom’s associates.
‘A haemorrhage of money’
Ms Woods believes the bank owed her a duty of care and should have questioned her actions and investigated the payments.
She said: “Looking back now over my bank statements, there was a total haemorrhage of money out of my account, hundreds of thousands of pounds in a matter of a few weeks, all going into one particular account.
“You would think some red flag should have been raised somewhere, I would have expected the bank to contact me.
“If they had shown some interest in me as a client, then perhaps this might not have happened. I mean, I do take responsibility myself, for part of it.”
“But I think one of the very good things that’s happened since I highlighted this sort of coercive control and wrote about it is that people are much, much more aware,” she continued.
“I was very much regarded as just a silly woman at the time. I think things have moved on a lot since then and there’s a lot more understanding about that.”
Acklom duped Ms Woods into thinking he was a wealthy Swiss banker and a secret agent
Soon after she had stopped making transfers, Ms Woods discovered some payments had been made without her authorisation.
When she queried them, she said the bank told her it couldn’t explain the missing funds but the money was paid back into her account.
Barclays then closed her account and wouldn’t say why.
Broke, homeless and suicidal
It was a year before Ms Woods realised she had been lied to and defrauded by Acklom, leaving her broke, homeless and suicidal.
She discovered Acklom’s long history of fraud and was told that far from being a rich bachelor flying in to see her from Switzerland, he had been living nearby with his wife and two young daughters.
By that time Acklom had fled abroad.
After a slow and shoddy start to an investigation, for which they later apologised, Avon and Somerset police arrested the former Barclays employee into whose account Acklom had insisted the money be paid.
He told police that he, too, had been under Acklom’s coercive control, had acted under threat and later became a potential prosecution witness.
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Prolific British conman: The life and crimes of Mark Acklom
The man told me recently: “This is a part of my life I never want to revisit, never want to talk about, never ever want to go back to. Because it was a living hell and a living nightmare for me.
“I’ve worked so hard to rebuild my mental state. I was in such a manipulative position where I could not move, could not see, could not eat, could not drink, could not do a damn thing, unless I was authorised.”
Detectives also arrested a woman who was still working for the bank and whose account had held some of the money at some stage.
When Sky News called at her home this week to try to ask her about her alleged involvement, a young man threatened to call the police. The woman appears to have since deleted her LinkedIn business profile.
During the police investigation, both suspects were questioned and bailed but later released without charge.
In a letter to Barclays Ms Woods, 62, wrote: “I realise that banking safeguards have improved since 2012/13, but some recent events have led me to believe that I wasted my time going after Mark Acklom and his accomplices through the so-called criminal justice system, and that Barclays Bank should have been held equally accountable for my losses – something I thought would follow on naturally once the case came to trial.
“There is absolutely no doubt that this crime was enabled with the help of a bank ‘insider’.”
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A story of love and deception by a conman
‘There’s a strong moral argument for Barclays to pay up’
Lawyer Arun Chauhan, who sits on the Fraud Advisory Panel, a charitable body which advises the public on dealing with fraud, said Barclays had no legal obligation to refund Ms Woods anything, but there was a strong moral argument to do so.
He said: “I think Barclays need to look at it and say, ‘well if we, for example, find that our employees were involved to quite a degree and they used their internal information knowledge about how we operate to facilitate and assist the fraud,’ I think they need to stand back and ask themselves ‘should we bear any responsibility morally for this?’
“And that might well lead to them saying they should offer a goodwill payment, but they won’t make any admission of liability.
“If the events of the story took place today, I think the landscape would be very different.
“The banks are very conscious about coercive control, romance fraud, situations where people are being manipulated into making transactions, not just being tricked with false account details, but being manipulated.
“There are guidance standards about customer vulnerability, looking out for vulnerable customers.
“I think there would have been a much greater prospect of a recovery (of the stolen money) if those events happened today. And that’s really unfortunate.”
Barclays has told Ms Woods it was investigating her claim.
A spokesman told Sky News: “For confidentiality reasons we cannot comment on individual customer affairs.”
Ms Woods was cheated out of all her savings by Acklom
Mark Acklom, now aged 50, was jailed for five years and eight months in 2019 after pleading guilty to five of the 20 fraud charges he faced, effectively admitting he stole around £300,000 from Ms Woods.
The judge who sentenced him told Ms Woods it was “pretty unlikely” she would get any money back from Acklom.
He was freed after serving little more than two years and should have spent many more months living under licence in the UK with restrictions on his freedom and regular contact with probation officers.
But almost immediately the fraudster was extradited to Spain to complete a prison sentence he had fled from there.
The extradition judge said his UK licence period could be served concurrently with his Spanish sentence.
In agreeing to be extradited, Acklom also avoided the rare imposition of a five-year serious crime prevention order, which would have placed severe restrictions on his freedom.
The extradition judge told him there was no expectation of him returning to Britain.
Acklom was freed in Spain in May, earlier than expected. His whereabouts are unknown.
UK
Facewatch: The controversial tech that retailers have deployed to tackle shoplifting and violence
The Christmas period is upon us, and goods are flying off the shelves, but for some reason, the tills are not ringing as loudly as they should be.
Across the country, the five-finger discount is being used with such frequency that retailers are taking action into their own hands.
With concerns about the police response to shoplifting, many are now resorting to controversial facial recognition technology to catch culprits before they strike.
Sainsbury’s, Asda, Budgens and Sports Direct are among the high-street businesses that have signed up to Facewatch, a cloud-based facial recognition security system that scans faces as they enter a store. Those images are then compared to a database of known offenders and, if a match is found, an alert is set off to warn the business that a shoplifter has entered the premises.
It comes as official figures show shoplifting offences rose by 13% in the year to June, reaching almost 530,000 incidents. Figures reported in August showed more than 80% result in no charge.
At the same time, retailers are reporting more than 2,000 cases of violence or abuse against their staff every day. Faced with mounting losses and safety concerns, businesses say they are being forced to take security into their own hands because stretched police forces are only able to respond to a fraction of incidents.
A Facewatch camera
At Ruxley Manor Garden Centre in south London, managing director James Evans said theft had become increasingly brazen and organised, with losses from shoplifting now accounting for around 1.5% of turnover. “That may sound small, but it represents a significant hit to the bottom line,” he said, pointing out that thousands of pounds’ worth of goods can be stolen in a single visit.
“We have had instances where the children get sent in to do it. They know that the parents will be waiting in the car park and they’ll know that there’s nothing that we can do to stop them.”
Gurpreet Narwan is seen at the garden centre while being shown how Facewatch works
Staff members here have also had their fair share of run-ins with shoplifters. In one case, employees trying to stop a suspected shoplifter were nearly struck by an accomplice in a car. “This is no longer just about stock loss,” said James, “It is about the safety of our staff.”
However, the technology is not without its critics. Civil liberties groups have warned that the expansion of this type of technology is eroding our privacy.
Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, called it “a very dangerous kind of privatised policing industry”.
Facewatch is seen in operation as retailers look to crack down on crime.
“[It] really threatens fairness and justice for us all, because now it’s the case that just going to do your supermarket shopping, a company is quietly taking your very sensitive biometric data. That’s data that’s as sensitive as your passport, and [it’s] making a judgement about whether you’re a criminal or not.”
Silkie said the organisation was routinely receiving messages from people who said they had been mistakenly targeted. They include Rennea Nelson, who was wrongly flagged as a shoplifter at a B&M store after being mistakenly added to the facial recognition database. Nelson said she was threatened with police action and warned that her immigration status could be at risk.
Gurpreet’s profile can be seen on the Facewatch database
“He said to me, if you don’t get out, I’m going to call the police. So at that point I turned around and I was like, are you speaking to me? Then he was like yes, yes, your face set off the alarm because you’re a thief… At that point, I was around six to seven months pregnant and I was having a high-risk pregnancy. I was already going through a lot of anxiety and, so him coming over and shouting at me, it was like really triggering me.”
The retailer later acknowledged the error and apologised, describing it as a rare case of human mistake.
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A spokesperson for B&M said: ‘This was a simple case of human error, and we sincerely apologise to Ms Nelson for any upset caused. Reported incidents like this are rare. Facewatch services are designed to operate strictly in compliance with UK GDPR and to help protect store colleagues from incidents of aggressive shoplifting.”
The cloud-based technology has critics who argue that it amounts to a misuse of personal data and privacy
Nick Fisher, chief executive of Facewatch, said the backlash was disproportionate.
“Well, I think it’s designed to be quite alarmist, using language like ‘dystopian’, ‘orwellian’, ‘turning people into barcodes’,” he said.
“The inference of that is that we will identify people using biometric technology, hold and store their own, store their data. And that’s just, quite frankly, misleading. We only store and retain data of known repeat offenders, of which it’s been deemed to be proportionate and responsible to do so… I think in the world that we are currently operating in, as long as the technology is used and managed in a responsible, proportionate way, I can only see it being a force for good.”
Yet, there is obviously widespread unease, if not anger, at the proliferation of this technology. Businesses are obviously alert to it, but the bottom line is calling.
Jeffrey Epstein led two different lives – sex offender and celebrity networker – and he did that in the UK as well as the US.
The newly released Epstein documents reveal, in particular, how the paedophile financier ascended into the highest levels of British society.
This photo of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor sprawled across the lap of several women, whose identities have been protected, speaks to his close relationship with Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who was jailed for child sex trafficking and other offences in connection with Epstein. But the furnishings are even more revealing.
Epstein files – latest updates
Andrew Mountbatten Windsor pictured with Ghislaine Maxwell. Note: inclusion in Epstein files does not infer wrongdoing
Sky News matched the fireplace in this photo with the one in Sandringham, the estate where the royals tend to spend Christmas – (Andrew is not invited this year).
Andrew has vigorously denied any accusations against him.
Prince Charles, now King Charles III, at Sandringham with Prince Edward. Pic: PA
Also included in the latest release are Epstein’s flight records. They provide some useful corroborating evidence.
A flight log from the Epstein files
On 9 March 2001, his plane landed at “EGGW” – Luton Airport – with JE, GM and VR on board – Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Virginia Roberts, better known by her married name of Virginia Giuffre and perhaps Epstein’s most famous accuser.
The next day is when this photo was alleged to have been taken, in London, of Giuffre and Andrew.
Prince Andrew, Virginia Roberts, aged 17, and Ghislaine Maxwell at Ghislaine Maxwell’s townhouse in London, in March 2001
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell hunting, date unknown. Pic: US DoJ
Other photos show Maxwell on the steps of Downing Street – and power was as much a draw as celebrity.
Ghislaine Maxwell outside 10 Downing Street, date unknown. Pic: US DoJ
On 15 May 2002, the flight records show Epstein again arriving at Luton.
A flight log from the Epstein files
The next day is when he met Tony Blair, prime minister at the time. This was before Epstein’s first arrest and there is no suggestion of wrongdoing.
Read more:
New photos of Jeffrey Epstein’s circle released
Ghislaine Maxwell sex trafficking case material to be released
The meeting was arranged by Peter Mandelson, who lost his job as ambassador to the US because of his Epstein connections, and who features prominently in the files.
Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein. Pic: US DoJ
The UK was a draw for Epstein’s wider circle too – Maxwell here is pictured touring the Churchill War Rooms with Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey. Neither are accused of wrongdoing or knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
(L-R) Ghislaine Maxwell, Kevin Spacey and Bill Clinton, with three other men. Pic: US DoJ
And the other grim life that Epstein led, of sex trafficking, also had British links.
A page from the Epstein files
Another document released in the files, from 2019, shows witness testimony from Maxwell’s trial. In it, a victim is mentioned who is “17 years old” and who grew up “in England”. She would later be taken to Epstein’s private Caribbean island.
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