A fraudster who tricked men into spending thousands of pounds on designer clothes, holidays and online betting has been jailed for seven years.
Model Gemma Kingsley, 50, took aim at recently divorced men and claimed they were set to inherit millions so they could splurge on them.
Swindon Crown Court heard he also used stolen or false card details to pay for fancy hotels, including a five-star resort in the Alps.
“Your duplicity and hard-neckedness are shocking,” the judge told him during sentencing.
“You are a deceitful woman who traded her charm, charisma and good looks to lure and trap her victims without regard for the trail of destruction she left behind.”
Kingsley found his victims on dating sites, and the court was told they fell “hopelessly in love” with him.
Prosecutor Barry McElduff Casey said, “They didn’t want to believe that their stories were fiction, even when they were faced with reality.”
One of the victims lost more than £125,000, and was left “miserable and humiliated” when her marriage to Kingsley failed.
Mr McElduff said she soon moved on to another man, using the same story that she was to inherit £80million from a relative’s will.
Kingsley eventually defrauded her of £30,000, and later claimed that she was pregnant with twins.
Six months after the fraud, the man found photos of various bank and credit cards on his phone and called the police.
Judge Jason Taylor Casey told Kingsley that she “cleverly pulled whatever levers she deemed necessary to extract as much as you could”, and called her a “financial predator always looking for easy prey”.
€94,000 bill and fake Australian accent
His other victims included a man whose card he used to pay a €94,000 (£81,000) bill at an alpine resort – for which he has been convicted of fraud in France.
He even duped his mother’s carer into paying him £990 for the holiday they all took together.
On another occasion, Kingsley used a male Australian accent to trick a finance company into making a loan payment over the phone.
The lies didn’t stop when he was arrested. Kingsley claimed that they were infatuated with him and were seeking revenge.
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In a victim impact statement, one man told the court it was “a deliberate decision by someone I thought loved me. He betrayed me mentally, emotionally and financially”.
Kingsley of Beadnell northumberlandHad previously admitted four counts of fraud, six counts of theft and three other fraud-related charges.
His lawyer said he was “extremely sorry for his actions”.
Michael Gomulka said, “She herself had come out of a difficult relationship and had some mental health problems.”
“But none of these can possibly explain the continued course of conduct for which he is to be punished.”
