Conman built his own bank fraud kit
‘Inspector Gadget’ device used to target vulnerable
A FORMER rave promoter built an ‘Inspector Gadget-style’ fraud machine to target hundreds of victims, including celebrity members of a London club.
Tony Colston-Hayter, 53, compiled a target list after obtaining a stolen spreadsheet of bank and personal details belonging to stars such as Noel Gallagher and Sheridan Smith.
Details of his intended victims emerged yesterday as he was jailed for nearly two years for defrauding hundreds of people using the extraordinary machine.
He built it after being released early from a five-and-a-half year sentence for a previous £1.25million banking scam.
It allowed Colston-Hayter to modify his voice so he could imitate bank staff, play prerecorded fake bank messages and disguise his phone number to make it look like he was calling from a bank’s fraud department so he could con the vulnerable into handing over account details.
It is not known exactly how much he stole, but police believe the machine he built for £97 could potentially have given him access to accounts worth £20million.
It is thought he accessed accounts containing at least £500,000 – money which he blew on class A drugs. Described by police as a ‘shrine’ to crime, the machine was decorated with an image of God and Jesus.
Devout Colston-Hayter was known to sprinkle holy water on it before he cold-called victims.
Detective Inspector Philip McInerney from the Met Police’s cyber crime unit likened the device to something from 1980s cartoon Inspector Gadget, adding: ‘We had never seen anything like it.
‘We had to send it off to the digital communications and cyber laboratory to work out what it was and establish it actually worked.’
Colston-Hayter was known in his youth as the Acid House King because of the raves he organised in the Home Counties in 1989 when in his twenties.
The events caused outrage at the time, attracting thousands of children as young as 12 and were rife with drugs.
The son of a lecturer and a solicitor, he had a privileged upbringing in the London suburb of Hamp- stead. At 16, he persuaded the head of his school to let him set up a clubroom with a coin-operated video game he profited from.
Months later, he convinced a bank manager to loan him £500 to start a video game business which enjoyed a million-pound turnover by the time he was 19 – before crashing with debts of £108,000.
He then became a professional gambler, eventually being banned from every casino in Britain.
He was jailed in 2014 for fiveand-a-half years for stealing £1.25million from a North London bank by taking control of its computer and siphoning off the cash.
In June this year he was caught while on licence after being released halfway through his sentence. Among the vast array of personal data and stolen banking documentation found at his Brighton flat, police discovered a spreadsheet relating to members of the Groucho Club in Soho.
There is no evidence members were defrauded but police believe it was a ‘target list’ containing the bank details, addresses, e-mails and phone numbers of stars thought to include Rachel Weisz.
Colston-Hayter was jailed at Southwark Crown Court on Wednesday for 20 months after admitting nine counts of possession of an article for use in fraud and two counts of making or supplying an article for use in fraud.