[imagesource: Tim Stewart]

You have to be a certain kind of person to make a ‘career’ out of being a conman.

In order to become the UK’s most notorious conman, a title bestowed on Mark Acklom by multiple media outlets, you also have to be good at what you do.

Acklom certainly was, although he is currently behind bars, so he was far from perfect. He has previously been jailed five times in Spain, once in the UK, and once in Switzerland.

He will be a free man soon, though, with his impending release from prison subject to strict restrictions.

Acklom will have to declare all of his earnings, business dealings, and assets, stop using false names, and tell police of his movements, among other requirements.

He has served around a third of the sentence handed down to him after he duped a woman out of all her money amidst a marriage con.

Sky News reports:

He used an alias and posed as an MI6 agent and millionaire banker as he wooed Gloucestershire divorcee Carolyn Woods before isolating her from her family and friends, stealing £300,000 and leaving her heartbroken, destitute and suicidal.

At the time, he was married with two young children and living with his family a few miles away – telling Ms Woods he was flying to see her from his home in Switzerland.

Woods doubts that Acklom will ever change, even with the strict conditions of his release in place, and she has a point.

His conman ‘career’ began more than 30 years ago, when he was 16 and was jailed for stealing his father’s credit card.

He went on a wild spending spree, taking mates on private jet flights to European destinations, and conning a building society into giving him a £500 000 mortgage, which he spent on a mansion in London.

In 2015, he was jailed in Spain after defrauding two brothers, but fled to Switzerland after being granted temporary release.

Spanish authorities have asked that he be extradited back to the country to complete his sentence, and a London court is set to rule on that soon.

After Acklom had fled from Spain, Sky News managed to track him down to an area close to Zurich:

[They] discovered him living with his Spanish wife and children in a luxury lakeside apartment outside Zurich, where he duped a German former banker into giving him 400,000 euros for a company he claimed was making black box data recorders for driverless cars.

His wife, Maria Yolanda Ros Rodriques, is pictured alongside him in that photo right up the top.

The German former banker, Harald Herbon, believed Acklom when he said he was the European agent for Elon Musk.

When agents came to arrest Acklom, it’s been reported that he tried to jump from a balcony before being wrestled to the ground.

Get cracking, Netflix – there’s a great true-crime series here for the taking.

Sky put together this doccie back in 2019, featuring the first TV interview with Diana Acklom, his mother, who has “an extraordinary theory for her son’s prolific crimes”.

When you have 49 minutes to spare, go right ahead:

[source:sky]