,
14 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
Marc Marshall, the defendant who died yesterday after dousing himself in acid in court, was Mark Hill-Wood, a fraudster I investigated for the best part of a year back in 2015/16 bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan… 
Marshall, or Mark Roger Castley as he was known, was one of the UK's most prolific fraudsters, a conman who had spent the best part of 30 years tricking people out of their money. His first conviction was in 1991
He was jailed multiple times. In 2004 for making hundreds of thousands of pounds through a scam involving bogus surveillance equipment and in 2008 for conning people in Stevenage into funding his wedding and helicopter trips to Ascot
At the time his defence counsel described him as a "Walter Mitty character [who] lives the high life by guile and warm words, without thinking about tomorrow". As was his pattern as soon as he was out of prison, he started his next scam.
He was caught by the Daily Mail posing as a wealthy batchelor on Sugardaddie.com, a lie he used to con a single mother out of money. In 2011 he was jailed again, this time for tricking Team GB athletes out of thousands of pounds in a sponsorship scam
He changed his name by deed poll to Phillip Buffett, circumventing a ban on holding a directorship. He set up Uber Intelligence and used the company to cheat freelancers and companies. He bought a £216k watch & clothing worth £28k from Harrods using a dodgy cheque
Buffett later used the watch to get a loan of £77k. He was arrested & admitted seven counts of fraud. Judge Simon Oliver told him: "You are neither rich nor successful. Your 48 [previous convictions] show me you are completely unsuccessful in all that you do."
Within a few months Buffett had adopted a new alias, Mark Hill-Wood. He was also back in the news. This time he was arrested on suspicion of cheating the former wife of bankrupt tycoon Scot Young, who was found impaled on the railings of his penthouse flat in London on Dec 2014
Believing Hill-Wood was a private detective, Michelle Young paid him £14,000 to track down her ex-partner's missing fortune. When he requested extra money without providing any information she called the police.
By the time I started investigating him in 2015 he was posing as the head of a private investigations company called FullProof Intelligence. Nothing about the company was genuine. When we exposed his lies he changed his name to Mark Cas, set up another company and carried on
It was even alleged that the family of disgraced footballer Adam Johnson paid Hill-Wood/Cas £170,000 after he claimed he could uncover evidence that would clear him of child sex charges
I eventually tracked him to a flat in Camberwell. It was 2016 and he was posing as Marc Marshall, a former government operative and brains behind Stellar Intelligence. But all of his qualifications and his companies accreditations were lies
He paid freelancers in US to make bogus videos praising his company's investigative skills. So I tracked them down and asked them to make the same videos for the Advertiser
I left three years ago but still get tip-offs about Mark Hill-Wood. Last I knew he was posing as an eccentric wildlife photographer and had stolen photos from dozens of professional snappers. I was told he would walk around the neighbourhood with a wooden parrot on his shoulder
