Mark Stanner, left, threatened and intimidated Mark Best, right, into paying him £185,000 over the course of four years (Picture: Cavendish Press)
A blind man was forced to hand over £185,000 of inheritance from his late mother to a fraudster who persistently bullied him for four years.
Mark Best, a visually impaired piano tuner, was subjected to a shocking ordeal at the hands of cruel sales director Mark Stanner.
Stanner, 42, led a heartless operation in which he duped Mr Best, 55, into believing he owed money for promoting his business services online.
His grim tactics included intimidating Mr Best with texts, phone calls and emails demanding money, as well as aggressive threats from people claiming to be debt collectors or the police.
He also warned Mr Best that bailiffs would be visiting his property ‘within the hour’ to seize possessions and change the locks if he didn’t pay up.
Mr Best, who was said to have been ‘played like a violin’, borrowed thousands of pounds from friends and was even forced to evict his own uncle from the house his mum had left him in order to sell it and raise cash to pay back the bogus “debts”.
Years of torment began when Mr Best used his braille software to read a number of fake invoices sent to him by Stanner, some of which said he had less than half an hour to pay.
Mark Best, a blind piano tuner, said he suffered ‘numerous panic attacks’ and was made to feel ‘unsafe’ in his own home because of the constant demands for cash (Picture: Cavendish Press)
Stanner used a call centre company in Manchester as a front for his fraud and underwent a series of aliases to repeatedly follow up on the illegitimate invoices with aggressive phone calls and texts.
By the time police were finally called in to investigate the case, Mr Best had borrowed a whopping £30,000 from friends and was left virtually penniless.
When he was tracked down, Stanner – who calls himself ‘The Window Wizard’ – claimed to have squandered the money on gambling and drugs.
But pictures on Facebook showed him enjoying several holidays in Turkey and the Middle East with his unwitting fiancee Gail Spink and her children during the course of the fraud between January 2017 and July 2021.
Mark Stanner, pictured enjoying holidays abroad with his unwitting fiancee Gail Spink (Picture: Cavendish Press)
It emerged Stanner targeted Mr Best after getting hold of the victim’s phone number and email from his business website and social media pages.
He also recruited friends and family to use their bank accounts to split the cash between, including his sister Martina Turner, 44, who allowed £31,000 of Mr Best’s money to go through her account.
Mr Best, from Basingstoke, Hampshire, who lives with his wife Chris who is also blind, said they were both badly affected ‘financially and emotionally’ by Stanner’s ‘intimidating and aggressive bullying tactics’.
‘My trusting nature has now been taken full advantage of by those who see fit to con vulnerable people purely out of greed for …read more
Source:: Metro
