Achilleas Kallakis, together with Alex Williams, formerly known as Stephan Kollakis and Martin Lewis, were found guilty of orchestrating Britain’s biggest ever mortgage fraud.
Achilleas Kallakis, who changed his name from Stephan Kollakis after a previous conviction.
Britain’s most successful serial confidence trickster, Achilleas Kallakis, faces up to 10 years in jail after being found guilty of duping banks out of more than £750m.
Kallakis and his co-fraudster, Alex Williams, will appear at Southwark crown court on Thursday to receive their sentence for orchestrating Britain’s biggest ever mortgage fraud. The former Croydon travel agent tricked a series of bankers into believing he was a super-rich Mayfair property baron and convinced them to lend him millions to fund lucrative deals.
The sentencing comes almost 18 years after the two men previously stood alongside one another – at the same court – pleading guilty to a forgery scheme involving the sale of bogus manorial titles to unsuspecting Americans. Reports of these earlier convictions were not picked up by banks because Kallakis and Williams had changed their names.
Far from being deterred by their initial brush with the courts, the two set about hatching an even more elaborate scheme – this time targeting bank loans. Stephan Kollakis and Martin Lewis were reinvented as Achilleas Kallakis (with an “a”) and Alex Williams.
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