Article: The Most Gullible Man In Britain

The village ruined by the most gullible man in Britain: Incredible story of the chartered surveyor, an email pledging a £3m lotto win and the neighbours impoverished in a web of sheer greed

By Paul Bracchi

Arthur Stimpson, from Norfolk, was 'brainwashed' by an email scam into believing he had won £2.7million on a Spanish lottery and handed over £50,000 of his own money to conmen who claimed it was needed to release the massive windfall. When his own money ran out, Stimpson fooled those closest to him into handing over more than £1.1million in his increasingly desperate bid to get his hands on the jackpot.

 Image of respectability: Surveyor Arthur Stimpson was jailed for four years

Back in the summer of 2007, an email from ‘Spain’ arrived in Arthur Stimpson’s inbox. The words ‘ATTENTION: NOTIFICATION OF AWARD’ were written in capital letters at the top and below was a letter informing him that he had won a major prize in the Spanish national lottery.

His name had apparently been selected at random and entered by computer into the draw. All he had to do was ring the number given to claim his prize.

Now, at this stage, most of us would probably have stopped reading and pressed the ‘delete’ button because, as the old adage goes, ‘if something appears too good to be true, then it probably is’.

If only Mr Stimpson had heeded that advice. Instead, curiosity got the better of him and he found himself dialling the number in the email. The voice at the end of the line was ‘delighted’ to tell him that he had scooped 3.3 million euros (£2.7 million).

Of course, there would be ‘administrative costs’ requiring the payment of certain ‘transfer fees’, for tax and insurance purposes and suchlike, but when these had been cleared the ‘transfer process’ could begin and he would receive his windfall.

Mr Stimpson, it should be pointed out, attended both university and public school and was a Member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (MRICS). In other words, he was a man of considerable intelligence and accomplishment. Remember that, when you read what follows.

His decision to take what he had been told by the man with the thick Spanish accent at face value was the start of an astonishing — and sometimes farcical — chain of events that had cataclysmic consequences, not just for Mr Stimpson himself but also for his wife, four children, aged 12 to 23, and the local community in the village of Suffield in Norfolk (pop: 140), who were unwittingly entangled in an ever-spreading nightmare.

For, as any sensible person must have already guessed, behind that ‘too good to be true’ email were ruthless conmen.

How much do you think the normally levelled-headed, bespectacled Mr Stimpson paid to the ‘representatives’ of the ‘state lottery board in Madrid’ — in so-called ‘transfer fees’? The figure is believed to have exceeded an almost unbelievable £1 million.

The first £50,000 came from Mr Stimpson’s own life savings. After he had ‘wired’ the money to Iberian bank accounts, though, he was he told that — surprise, surprise — it was not enough to release the ‘jackpot’. More fees were needed. So Mr Stimpson persuaded friends and neighbours into parting with their own money with promises of up to 1,000 per cent returns. Most never saw their cash again.

 On at least one occasion, the court heard, Mr Stimpson put £75,000 into a plastic bag and handed it over to ‘men from the lottery board’ who turned up at the end of his drive by prior arrangement.

The brothers who run a local butcher’s shop gave him £74,000; a farmer who had known Mr Stimpson for many years contributed £110,000; the godfather to one of Mr Stimpson’s children stumped up £90,000. Others ‘loaned’ him sums of £150,000, £85,000, £30,000, or £10,000. In all, 13 victims were drawn into Mr Stimpson’s desperate attempt to obtain the non-existent lottery millions.

Almost every penny, police suspect, ended up the hands of the lottery conmen.

It would be difficult to imagine a more breathtaking example of gullibility, fuelled by greed, than the story of Arthur Stimpson, which culminated this week with his being jailed for four years at Norwich Crown Court on multiple fraud and forgery charges.

By then, Mr Stimpson, in his customary grey tweed jacket, was a broken man; he had lost everything — his reputation, his friends, and his magnificent eight-bedroom former Victorian rectory worth £1.25 million, which was sold to help pay off creditors (including those he had duped himself).

But the sale allowed him to repay them only £280,000 because the property had a mortgage, leaving them £874,000 out of pocket. Has one email ever cost a man so dear?

It is the details of his story that are so astonishing. On at least one occasion, the court heard, Mr Stimpson put £75,000 into a plastic bag and handed it over to ‘men from the lottery board’ who turned up at the end of his drive by prior arrangement. His wife Emma, needless to say, was unaware of the illicit rendezvous or the increasingly dangerous world her husband was being sucked in

Sold: The Old rectory in Suffield, Norfolk, the former home of chartered surveyor turned conman Arthur Stimpson

Mr Stimpson is an extreme example; but he is certainly not alone. Every day, otherwise sensible individuals, from all over the country, succumb to cyber crime. The overseas lottery scam is among the most ubiquitous, the modern version, if you like, of the notorious timeshare rackets of the Seventies and Eighties.

The conmen, some of them Nigerians based on the Spanish mainland, but with a network of accomplices in Britain, pump out faxes, emails and letters in English claiming to be the organisers of El Gordo, or The Fat One (a Christmas lottery with billions in prize money on offer) or La Primitiva (a weekly lottery) to name but two.

The vast majority of those targeted are not taken in. But a very significant minority are. How significant a minority? An estimated three million people every year, according to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), although few end up being fleeced so spectacularly as Arthur Stimpson.

Even now, those who knew him as a conservatively dressed chartered surveyor still find it hard to believe that this was the same Arthur Stimpson who was passing carrier bags stuffed full of notes to shady ‘middlemen’.

It’s not as if he needed the money. Stimpson, a school contemporary of Stephen Fry, was wealthy in his own right, the scion of a well-known local farming and land-owning family. He worked freelance for several firms of local estate agents, specialising in country house and agricultural land sales, and had a reputation for being  ‘straightforward and honest’,.

So what happened after he responded to that fateful email? Well, a crude but well-rehearsed criminal operation swung in to action, one that would be unleashed on anyone foolish enough to take the bait. It lasted more than three unrelenting years.

Once he had expressed an interest, Mr Stimpson began to be bombarded — via email — with ‘official’ bank letters, documents and certificates.

Some bore the name of a Luis Alberti from the ‘Casa Blanca’ bank in Madrid. A simple Google search would have established that the Casa Blanca bank does not exist.

There was also a ‘statement’ supposedly showing that the windfall had been deposited in the Madrid branch of the Banca Unicaja. This bank is real enough. But, again, had Mr Stimpson bothered to type ‘Banca Unicaja’ into an internet search engine, he would have discovered that the ‘Banca Unicaja’ has been frequently used in lottery scam correspondence.

Indeed, a warning about such scams has been posted on the website of the British Embassy in Madrid. ‘The Spanish Lottery has informed us that they are aware of the major problem of the circulation of bogus letters announcing false lottery wins,’ it says. ‘Many of these letters purport to be from the state lottery organisation, but are not genuine.’

The initial email was sent in July, 2007. He is understood to have wired the first ‘transfer fees’ instalment to Spain just a few days later. It is unclear for exactly how much.

But he continued transferring money at regular intervals and was repeatedly assured on the phone, or by email, that he was about to receive his fortune ‘any day.’ Within a few months, all his savings had been squandered. By then, Mr Stimpson had lost £50,000.

 ‘His story [about the lottery] sounded feasible at the time,’ said one victim, who asked not to be named, but who lost more than £50,000. ‘At first I gave him £10,000. Then we gave him more money over the next few weeks. He gave us copies of all sorts of bank statements and letters which apparently showed the money was waiting for him.'

Why didn’t he just cut his losses and stop? It is a question, of course, that could be put to anyone who has ever been conned; anyone who has ever gambled. Presumably, Mr Stimpson thought he had passed the ‘point of no return,’ that he had no option but to keep ‘gambling’ in the hope that he would eventually recoup his ‘stake’.

In fact, Mr Stimpson went for broke, so to speak, embroiling friends and business acquaintances into the scam. Among the first to be approached, in April, 2008, were father-and-son farmers Steven and Peter Howell, from nearby Bintree. They gave him more than £100,000 (they took the precaution of taking out a legal charge on Mr Stimpson’s home so they eventually got their money back).

Others were not so lucky. ‘His story [about the lottery] sounded feasible at the time,’ said one victim, who asked not to be named, but who lost more than £50,000. ‘At first I gave him £10,000. Then we gave him more money over the next few weeks. He gave us copies of all sorts of bank statements and letters which apparently showed the money was waiting for him.

‘He was promising £10,000 back for very £1,000 we spent. The money was always just days away. I put him on the spot once and asked him to swear on the lives of his wife and children that he was getting the money and he did swear. I think he believed it.’

Police believe all the money was either being wired abroad or personally handed over to the fraudsters in envelopes by Mr Stimpson. All the details of these handover meetings are supplied by Mr Stimpson, and it is possible that none took place, and that he was pocketing some of the money himself in a desperate bid to cover his losses. But on the balance of evidence, detectives believe his story.

One of the most colourful meetings — perhaps bizarre would be a more accurate description — took place in London in the summer of 2009. Mr Stimpson was shown a briefcase allegedly containing several million U.S. dollars by a man purporting to be a Spanish ‘bank official.’ This was his lottery money, Mr Stimpson was told.

It had been stained with protective dye for ‘security reasons’ to prevent anyone stealing it. Before it could be handed over to Mr Stimpson, it would have to be  sent to specialist company in Switzerland to be cleaned with chemicals. As a ‘gesture of good faith,’ however, Mr Stimpson was given a small amount of dollars that had already been ‘cleaned’.

Shortly afterwards, yet another bogus statement was produced to show that the ‘cleaned’ lottery prize money was in an offshore account with HSBC and ready to be ‘transferred to him imminently’.
And so it went on.

Paul and Karl Graves run a butcher’s shop in Briston. Arthur Stimpson was regular customer for years. They agreed to lend him £74,000 after being shown family oil paintings and heirlooms which Mr Stimpson said were worth tens of thousands of pounds. He assured the brothers that he would sell these possessions to repay them if the lottery millions didn’t materialise. In April last year Mr Stimpson did ‘repay’ them — just £20,000.

The list of victims goes on. Friend James Thompson, who chose Mr Stimpson as godfather to one of his children, never received a penny of the £80,000 he loaned him. Then there’s the Agnew brothers, James, 58, Stephen, 57, and St John, 47, childhood friends of Mr Stimpson who regularly socialised with him.

Mr Stimpson borrowed a total of more than £400,000 from them. They got £30,000 back. ‘We were all friends,’ said St John Agnew, a stockbroker. ‘My father was a very close friend of his father. He has totally betrayed the trust we had in him’.

Mr Stimpson was declared bankrupt in August, 2010. The following month he was forced to sell the family home — and move in with relatives. Mr Stimpson was finally questioned by detectives last December when they began taking statements from his victims.

What did he have to lose, Mr Stimpson must have asked himself, when he called that Spanish mobile phone number back in 2007. The answer, with hindsight, was everything.

‘There was a time once when Mr Stimpson was the well-thought of son of a well-thought of man,’ his barrister told Norwich Crown Court. ‘He feels nothing but remorse. He knows trust is at the core of every relationship. He bears responsibility for tearing that fabric. He would do anything to restore the fortunes of those he has affected for the worse.’

That will never happen. The perpetrators of the scam have never been identified, and since Stimpson pleaded guilty on all charges, the case is closed — the money is gone for ever, vanished overseas into a network of untraceable accounts.

No doubt, the lottery scammers can scarcely believe their luck, and are our there right now, hunting for another victim like Arthur Stimpson. Someone whose common sense can blinded by simple greed.