James Gillingham, a 38-year-old fraudster nicknamed "The Wolf of Essex" by his victims, has been told he will be jailed after running a £1 million Ponzi scheme that used aliases taken from the 2014 film The Riot Club to con investors. Southwark Crown Court heard the scam, run through a firm called Choice Option, was just one in a string of frauds Gillingham committed over more than a decade.
Gillingham, the son of a bus driver from Southend, hired a squad of cold-callers who posed as brokers using fake names including "Jonathan Hart" from the 1980s show Hart To Hart, "Harvey Specter" from the US drama Suits, and "Miles Richards," "Alistair Ryle" and "Harry Villiers" from The Riot Club. They used elaborate marketing brochures, email signatures and a fake trading platform to convince victims they were putting money into binary trading, where investors bet on whether shares, currencies or commodities will rise or fall.
"None of the victims' money was invested," the prosecutor told the court at the earlier sentencing of three of Gillingham's accomplices. Instead, the cash went on staff dividends, wages and expenses. The judge described Gillingham as the "brains" behind the fraud, saying it was his idea, that he recruited the callers and designed the documents, and that he "made more out of the fraud than anyone else."
A fabricated finance career
Gillingham, born James Hollingsworth in 1988, took the surname of his stepfather, an IT worker at a London law firm. He told friends and posted on LinkedIn that he had been a regular in Chelsea's youth team before an injury ended his football career, and that he later ran a foreign currency desk for merchant bank Close Brothers before being "headhunted" by Mayfair firm International Asset Management to help manage a £4 billion fund.
None of it was true. Chelsea has no record of him playing for the club. Close Brothers said he worked there only as a clerk for three years. International Asset Management said he was a temporary accounts assistant for 11 months from August 2011, with no trading role.
Early scams and a family betrayal
Gillingham launched his first fraudulent venture, JageroFX, in May 2012, claiming it had developed a trading algorithm and was later sold in a "successful buy-out." Terry Parker, the ex-husband of Gillingham's aunt, said he lost around £37,000 investing in a scheme he was told would profit from fluctuations in the gold market. "It turned out he'd never been a trader at all," Parker said. "It was effectively online gambling. It all went pear-shaped and that's when he disappeared. He just went totally off grid." Parker said the losses contributed to the breakdown of his marriage and left him with what he described as a nervous breakdown.
Gillingham then ran a second scheme from an office in London's Gherkin building. One victim, who asked not to be named, said his family lost more than £30,000. "He's just a scumbag, pure and simple, who invents stories about his talents and lures you in with his charm," the victim said.
Fleeing abroad as police closed in
The City of London Police began investigating Gillingham in 2016 after Choice Option clients found they could not access their accounts or withdraw funds. He fled to Mexico, moving in with a woman he had met online and telling her he was giving up a successful UK business for love, according to former associates. She later had a child with him before discovering the truth, by which time he was reportedly in trouble with local drug lords.
Abandoning his Mexican family, Gillingham moved to Singapore, where in October 2019, a month after a BBC Crimewatch appeal named him as wanted, he launched a cryptocurrency brokerage called Finxflo, described as a "one-stop solution for all cryptocurrency traders and investors." He was interviewed on CNN and Bloomberg TV as a successful former trader and later claimed the firm had raised £10 million and was valued at over half a billion dollars, despite only holding a temporary regulatory exemption in Singapore.
Collapse of a second empire
In December 2021, after the Daily Mail contacted Finxflo for comment, a senior executive replied from a personal Gmail account saying shareholders were "very interested to learn more about this police investigation." An ongoing police probe meant the findings could not be published at the time. Four months later, Gillingham was sacked as chief executive of Finxflo's holding company, which soon stopped trading.
He remained in Singapore and founded a second crypto exchange, Fleamint, announcing in 2023 that it had secured £8 million in funding and claiming 830,000 users. Initially valued at $36 million, it collapsed within about a year, losing nearly all its value. A former worker said Gillingham had failed to pay staff for months and left investors out of pocket.
Arrest, deportation and sentencing
Gillingham was arrested in Singapore after starting a brawl with two strangers during a night out, attacking a man and throwing punches at a woman, and committed further offences while on bail before pleading guilty. His Choice Option accomplices were jailed at Southwark Crown Court in 2024. Gillingham was deported to Britain in August last year and remanded in custody. He initially denied the charges but pleaded guilty earlier this year to fraud by false representation and money laundering. He was later charged with a third offence, perverting the course of justice, after submitting a false tenancy agreement to support a bail application.
At Southwark Crown Court, prosecutor James Fletcher said the fraud's "far reaching and long-lasting consequences" had left victims "depressed, humiliated, hurt and angry." One woman said her losses led to a bank loan being called in, forced her to remove her children from private school, contributed to her separation from her husband, and left her with lasting mental health problems. Gillingham's barrister said he felt "remorse" and was missing his young son. The judge said that had his fake tenancy not been "rumbled," he would have got bail and "disappeared again," telling him: "You were at the top of the pile. This was your fraud." Gillingham is due to be sentenced next Wednesday and remains on remand in Wandsworth prison.
Still posting from behind bars
Despite being in custody, Gillingham has continued updating his LinkedIn and social media accounts, describing himself as a "Singapore-based entrepreneur focused on building and scaling technology-driven businesses across financial markets, digital infrastructure, and emerging global industries." Posts on YouTube and Instagram, apparently pre-recorded or digitally altered, show him in a boardroom in front of trading screens and on a private jet. A former associate said: "He's shown no remorse and there's no chance this is the end. He's already plotting his comeback from jail. He will come back out and do this on a much greater scale. Investors should be very wary."
