Beware the Wolf of Essex! James Gillingham conned countless victims of their life savings – and now he’s plotting his next scam from prison

As the mastermind of a £1 million Ponzi fraud, James Gillingham ran a gang that used aliases from a hit movie to fleece victims.

Posing as reputable brokers and taking names from The Riot Club – a film about aristocratic Oxford University students – his ruthless team cold-called targets and pressured them to pay into an investment scheme which promised generous guaranteed returns.

In fact, every penny went to the bandits, with Southend-born bus driver’s son Gillingham, 38, pocketing the most from the scam which cost countless victims their life savings.

After Gillingham was yesterday finally told he will be jailed – a decade after the con – the Daily Mail can reveal it was just one of a string of frauds he committed. 

He was so prolific that victims gave him a nickname inspired by another movie: The Wolf of Essex.

And in many ways Gillingham’s life is more incredible than Jordan Belfort, the US finance scammer played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf Of Wall Street.

Using a backstory packed with falsehoods – including claims that he was a former Chelsea footballer, Old Etonian and former hedge fund trader who had run a £4 billion fund – he left a ‘trail of destruction’ across three continents. 

It included swindled friends and relatives, betrayed lovers, unpaid employees and hundreds of duped investors who were often left with their retirement plans in tatters.

Gillingham went from running his first scam in a two-bedroom £200,000 new-build maisonette in Shenfield, Essex, to living in a six-star luxury skyscraper in Singapore. 

Incredibly, even while the subject of an international manhunt by British police during his time in the Far East, he launched a high-profile global cryptocurrency brokerage which secured thousands of investors, many from the UK, who funnelled millions of pounds into it.

The fugitive was interviewed on CNN and Bloomberg TV where he was presented as a successful former trader promoting his new ‘investment’ venture – while back in the UK his face featured on a prime-time BBC One Crimewatch appeal describing him as a wanted fraudster.

But, most ominously, after finally being deported from Singapore and locked up in London’s Wandsworth prison while awaiting sentencing, he has somehow continued to promote his ‘finance’ career by posting multiple updates on his social media channels from behind bars.

As one despairing former associate said last night: ‘He’s shown no remorse and there’s no chance this is the end. He’s already plotting his comeback from jail. He will come back out and do this on a much greater scale. Investors should be very wary.’

Born James Hollingsworth in 1988, he changed his surname to that of his stepfather Robert Gillingham, an IT worker in a London law firm.

James Gillingham told friends – and posted on LinkedIn – that he moved into finance after his promising footballing career, which included being a regular in the Chelsea youth team, was cut short by injury in the ‘late 2000s’.

In fact, the Daily Mail has discovered he never played for the club in any capacity and would have been too old for the youth team by that time.

He was actually working in clerical roles during this period, flitting between jobs as he was variously made redundant or let go, former colleagues said, for being ‘a bit crap’ and repeatedly arriving late and badly hungover.

But obsessed with money and with an inventive imagination, Gillingham started plotting an illicit path from his lowly administrative positions to the world of high finance that he had glimpsed at work.

On his LinkedIn profile and in later posts and interviews, he claimed that he ran a foreign currency trading desk for Close Brothers, a leading UK merchant bank. 

Close Brothers said it has no record of him in this department, and the Daily Mail has discovered that he actually worked for the firm as a clerk for three years before being laid off. 

Gillingham also claimed that in February 2011 he was ‘headhunted’ by International Asset Management, based in London’s Mayfair, where he spent over a year as a senior foreign currency trader who ‘helped manage £4 billion fund of hedge funds’.

International Asset Management told the Daily Mail that he worked for the company for 11 months from August 2011 as a temporary assistant in the accounts department, and had no role in trading.

Armed with this bogus back story, Gillingham launched his first ‘fraudulent’ business, JageroFX, in May 2012.

He would later boast that the company developed a trading algorithm start-up to ‘maximise profitability and reduce risk’ for investors, which he led to a ‘successful buy-out’.

But Terry Parker, the ex-husband of Gillingham’s aunt, said he lost around £37,000 after making a ‘terrible mistake’ and investing in the scheme, which he was promised would make money from small fluctuations in the gold market. 

The builder said he trusted Gillingham because of the family connection and because he was told he was an experienced and successful trader in this area.

‘It turned out he’d never been a trader at all and hadn’t done anything like this before,’ Mr Parker said. ‘I didn’t realise at the time, but it was effectively online gambling. It all went pear-shaped and that’s when he disappeared. He just went totally off grid.

‘It was the final nail in the break-up of my marriage. I think I had a nervous breakdown – it was a traumatic time.’

Using some of the cash from illicit gains, Gillingham launched a new trading venture which he operated from a rented office in the Gherkin building in the City.

One victim, who did not wish to be named, described how his family lost more than £30,000 after he and relatives invested in the scheme. He had other friends who lost even more money in the scam.

‘He’s just a scumbag, pure and simple, who invents stories about his talents and lures you in with his charm,’ one told the Daily Mail.

By the time they realised that they had lost the money, Gillingham had moved on to a third scam – the one that, many years later, would lead to him being jailed.

Calling his firm Choice Option, he hired a squad of scammers to cold-call victims and dupe them into making ‘investments’ by using elaborate marketing brochures, often copies from respected trading firms, email signatures and an online account with a ‘trading platform’ to give ‘credence’ to their ‘lies’, Southwark Crown Court later heard.

Posing as ‘brokers’, the gang used aliases when corresponding with prospective clients, including ‘Jonathan Hart’ from 1980s crime show Hart To Hart, ‘Miles Richards’, ‘Alistair Ryle’ and ‘Harry Villiers’ from the 2014 film The Riot Club and ‘Harvey Specter’ from the US law drama Suits.

The ruse ‘deceived countless victims’ into handing over just over £1 million, which they thought was being put into the binary trading market, where investors bet on whether shares, currencies, or commodities such as oil or gold will rise or fall over a certain period of time.

In reality, the trading platform was not connected to a banking system and all the cash went on staff dividends, wages or expenses. 

‘None of the victims’ money was invested,’ the prosecutor later told Southwark Crown Court at the sentencing of three of Gillingham’s accomplices.

The judge described Gillingham as the ‘brains’ behind the fraud after hearing that it was his idea. He had recruited the cold-callers and designed the documentation used in it. He also ‘made more out of the fraud than anyone else,’ the court was told.

The scam had a ‘profound’ impact on victims who, as well as losing tens of thousands of pounds, were left feeling ‘embarrassed, ashamed and stupid’.

One woman said her losses meant that she had a loan called in by her bank, had to take her children out of private school, separated from her husband and has since suffered significant mental health problems.

Others had to abandon retirement dreams and are still forced to work weekends and extended hours to make up for their losses.

The City of London Police launched an investigation into Gillingham in 2016, after clients were unable to access their online accounts, contact company staff or withdraw their funds.

Soon afterwards, as the investigators closed in, he fled to Mexico where, according to former associates, he moved in with a woman he had met online.

Gillingham, who already had two children by two different women in the UK, is said to have told her he had a highly successful business in the UK but was giving it all up for love. 

By the time she found out the truth, she had a child with him and he was in trouble with local drug lords, former associates in the UK said.

Abandoning his Mexican family, he moved to Singapore where, in October 2019, a month after a UK police appeal for information about his whereabouts on BBC Crimewatch, he brazenly launched a high-profile project called Finxflo, described as a ‘one-stop solution for all cryptocurrency traders and investors’.

He launched a major PR offensive to drum up backers, posting numerous online videos boasting of his expertise.

His bravado paid off, and he was soon being interviewed on mainstream financial TV channels to promote Finxflo, which he later claimed had raised £10 million in investments and was valued at over half a billion dollars.

Gillingham repeatedly referred to the venture as ‘fully regulated’ across ‘multiple jurisdictions’, when in fact it only had an exemption from the Singapore financial regulator, allowing it to continue its operations while its licence application was being considered.

When anyone posted details in chatrooms of the ongoing British police hunt for him, he responded by falsely claiming it was fake news and sent threats to those he suspected of posting warnings.

With his colleagues unaware of his past and detectives in the UK struggling to get the Singapore authorities to take action, it looked like he might get away with it again.

But in December 2021, after the Daily Mail discovered details of Gillingham’s case and contacted Finxflo for comment, we received a panicked response from another senior executive at the company on his personal Gmail account saying the shareholders were ‘very interested to learn more about this police investigation’.

As there was an ongoing police probe, we were legally unable to publish our findings at the time.

But four months after our contact, Gillingham was sacked as CEO of Finxflo’s holding company, which stopped trading soon afterwards.

Gillingham remained in Singapore and founded Fleamint, which he describes as an exchange for investors to ‘trade crypto assets with trust and security’. 

In a press release in 2023 the platform announced it had secured £8 million in funding from a global investment group, and on its website it claims to have 830,000 users.

But this too crashed and burned. It was initially valued at $36 million but stopped trading after little more than a year after losing almost its entire value. 

The Daily Mail heard from one former worker who said he was left in a desperate financial state, claiming Gillingham had failed to pay staff for months and that scores of investors had also been left out of pocket.

By now, the net was at last closing. After a night downing tequila in a Singapore bar, Gillingham started an early-hours brawl with two strangers which led to him attacking a man and throwing punches at a woman.

He was arrested, but while on bail he committed further offences before eventually pleading guilty.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, his Choice Option accomplices were jailed at London’s Southwark Crown Court in 2024. 

After serving his jail sentence in Singapore, Gillingham was finally deported in August last year, and he was immediately remanded in custody in the UK while he awaited trial.

After initially denying the charges, earlier this year he pleaded guilty to fraud by false representation and money laundering.

But even in the UK his crimes still didn’t stop, and Gillingham submitted a false tenancy agreement in support of a bail application, leading to him being charged with a third offence of perverting the course of justice.

In the dock at Southwark Crown Court yesterday, Gillingham appeared bored as prosecutor James Fletcher outlined how the ‘far reaching and long-lasting consequences’ of his fraud had left victims ‘depressed, humiliated, hurt and angry’.

His new wife, who he is believed to have met in Singapore and has had a fourth child with, was the only person in the public gallery.

Gillingham’s barrister said he felt ‘remorse’ and was missing his young son and looked forward to returning to his family and ‘responsibilities as a father’ once released.

The judge told the court that had Gillingham’s fake tenancy ruse not been ‘rumbled’ he’d have got bail and ‘disappeared again’.

He told the defendant: ‘You were at the top of the pile. This was your fraud. You know it’s going to be a sentence of imprisonment. The question is, how long?’

Gillingham will be sentenced next Wednesday. In the meantime, he remains in Wandsworth prison on remand. 

And incredibly, despite having been on remand for a year, he has continued to update his LinkedIn and social media accounts, posing as operating in high finance in Singapore.

Posts on YouTube and Instagram, presumably pre-recorded before he went to jail or using AI to superimpose himself, purport to show him dispensing financial wisdom from a boardroom, in front of traders watching screens showing market movements, and on a private jet.

On his LinkedIn profile – which has been updated multiple times since he was locked up on remand – he describes himself as a ‘Singapore-based entrepreneur focused on building and scaling technology-driven businesses across financial markets, digital infrastructure, and emerging global industries’.

One former associate said: ‘He wants it to look like he’s still functioning out there in the real world so he can have a seamless transition when he’s released.

‘Jail won’t put him off. The Wolf of Essex will be back, and more hungry for new victims than ever before.’

investigations@dailymail.co.uk

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