A fraudster who conned property investors out of almost £600,000 has been jailed for more than six years.
John Keats-Ormandy, 42, from York, convinced investors to invest in his firm, with a view to receiving income from vacant properties, which would be refurbished and then rented out.
Bradford Crown Court heard that Keats-Ormandy had claimed to have contracts with the Ministry of Justice to house people and promised would-be investors rental income.
But the reality was that he defrauded many investors out of £592,000 because he had no legal interest in the properties that he was advertising.
He admitted fraud charges relating to eight potential investors in April.
Prosecutor Andrew Epsley told the court that the victims, including a cancer patient, carer and driving instructor, had lost life-savings and pension money.
Despite efforts to get their money back, those who fell for the fraud only received a total of £100,000 between them.
In a series of victim impact statements read out in court, one man who was hospitalised, said: “Words cannot begin to describe the pure nightmare we have been through.
“He has destroyed my trust in people.”
Another said: “I will have to keep working longer, if I survive the cancer.”
A Proceeds of Crime Act hearing is due later in the year.
Vanessa Warwick, co-founder of Property Tribes, has kept a close eye on this case.
She commented: “It’s great to see justice has prevailed. John Ormandy has been on the community radar at Property Tribes for many years, and we have numerous threads on him concerning the various different schemes he has run that have relieved investors of their money. In the absence of any formal regulation, community-generated due diligence and warnings are the thin line between consumer protection and financial loss.
“That is why it is so important that commentary in the public interest is allowed on social media. Many rogue property trainers use bully-boy tactics, law fare, dirty tricks, and even malicious threats to try and get content deleted.
“However, Google is your friend. Go beyond page one of the results and dig deeper – up to page four or five – to make sure the property trainer hasn’t “sunk” any negative commentary with their own articles.
“Many of them use important keywords like “scam” and “exposed” in their own article and video titles and keywords to ensure that their results top google and direct people to their website, not a page where a consumer might learn something important that will help them make an informed decision as to whether to work with that property trainer or not.”
Comments (2)
Thank you for your interest in this story and I am sorry you found my comment “jarring”, it was not intended that way at all.
I’d like to make you aware of a couple of things to clarify my comment:
First of all, I have been a member of the creditors’ private group on facebook for many years and I’ve done my best to support them during that time. I can tell you that they were all very relieved and jubilant that Mr. Ormandy received a custodial sentence. Many of them messaged me saying how delighted they were. Justice comes in many forms, and the general feeling of the group is that justice has indeed been served, and they also praised the police officer who tirelessly progressed this case.
Secondly, I myself have had first hand experience of John Ormandy and it caused me distress.
In March 2018, I received a legal threat from his solicitors saying he had a recorded phone call and a witness to say that I had been phoning his clients advising them not to work with him and he was going to take legal action against me for harassment unless all the threads about him were deleted on Property Tribes.
I wrote back and asked him for the date of these phone calls, the name of the witness, and a copy of the alleged phone recording … because obviously I had never done any such thing and was intrigued to know what his evidence was.
His lawyer wrote back to me saying that I was not entitled to the evidence but that it “came from a very credible source”, but did give me the date when I made the alleged phone calls.
On checking my diary, I found that on that date, I was on a ship in the middle of the North Sea with no phone signal and my phone records also backed up that I’d not made any calls on the day in question.
I was able to provide the ship’s itinerary and GPS plotting to prove my point.
I once again asked for the name of the witness and a copy of the alleged recording, but unsurprisingly never heard from his lawyers again.
This again shows the lengths rogue property trainers will go to, to shut down public commentary about them. I have been subjected to this kind of abuse and bullying on numerous occasions for simply commenting in the public interest, in the absence of any form of regulation.
That is why stories like this are important and they create awareness of the issues surrounding the unregulated “wealth creation” industry and I am grateful to EYE for reporting on them.
“It’s great to see justice has prevailed. John Ormandy has been on the community radar at Property Tribes for many years, and we have numerous threads on him concerning the various different schemes he has run that have relieved investors of their money.”
A very jarring quote from Ms Warwick after reading about the victims and what impact this scam has had on their lives and their families’ lives. After all the stress they must have gone through, to get back under one sixth of their life-savings (minus legal fees?) must not feel like ‘justice’.