Scam of the day

Turn up to a viewing at an expensive house in your best togs, boasting about your homes in Jamaica and Barbados, make a cash offer, ask if you can rent in the period up until completion because you've sold your previous property, and then move in claiming squatters' rights. Hmmm, crafty. But who could pull that off?

A couple in their 60s called Richard and Hazel Jerome, apparently.

The couple who posed as affluent house buyers to con sellers into renting their homes before squatting in the property were facing prison today. They did not pay rent or utility bills and had no intention of ever buying the properties, the jury was told.

They repeated the scam on two different properties with a combined total value of over £800,000 and squatted in them for a total of 18 months.

The elaborate scam left their victims - including a top criminal barrister - unable to sell their homes until the couple had been evicted following lengthy court proceedings.

One victim, Janet Jarvis, of Milton Keynes, Beds., and another of Mrs Jerome's former colleagues at a primary school where they both worked, died of cancer before the trial took place.

The con artists were finally arrested for driving a stolen car after it was spotted by police operating an automatic number plate recognition camera in January 2008.

A police detective, who first came across Mr Jerome 30 years earlier in an earlier case, then unearthed their web of deceit.

Today, the husband and wife, of no fixed abode, pleaded guilty to two charges of fraud at Huntingdon Crown Court in Cambridgeshire.

Mr Jerome pleaded guilty to an additional charge of fraud and a charge of obtaining money by deception.

Still at least they'll soon have a place to call their own home, even if it is a 8' x 6' cell.

Don't have nightmares.

Mr Jackson