Serial fraudster jailed

Habitual conman Mark Taylor is behind bars at last, a mere 21 years after I first exposed him.

His final fraud was a publishing business with the absurdly pompous name Global Media Corporation Ltd.

Run from a dingy office in Birkenhead, Merseyside, I told in

2013 how its coldcallers phoned companies and gave the impression they worked for the police to con generous businesses into taking out adverts in supposed emergency service magazines.

In 2016, this sham cost 52-year-old Taylor the maximum 15-year ban from being a company director. Now it’s also cost him a four and a half year jail sentence for fraudulent trading.

Liverpool crown court heard this week that he raked in £356,000 over three years from Global Media and sister sham operation Paramount Media.

James Rae, prosecuting, said that claims made by sales reps “were utterly specious”, and businesses who became suspicious and refused to pay for unwanted adverts were subjected to bullying tactics.

On paper, the director of Global

aMedia Corporation was his wife Kelie, 34, but it was Taylor who was pulling the strings.

She admitted aiding and abetting him to a breach of his directorship disqualification and was sentenced to a two-year community order and 175 hours unpaid work.

After the case Detective Sergeant Joanne Devers of Merseyside Police said: “Some of the people who were taken in by this fraud were small businesses who were just trying to make a living.”

Taylor has been running this type of scam since at least June 1997, when I told how he tricked businesses into paying for “charity” adverts in his supposed Emergency Services Yearbook – which wasn’t even published.

Ten of his companies behind that incarnation of the fraud were put into compulsory liquidation in the High Court in 2000 for “deliberate and dishonest misrepresentations”.

They raked in almost £940,000 in advertising fees in a single year but gave just £11,400 to charity. CALLOUS Taylor and wife Kelie