British Professional Gambler and Fake Lord Jailed for Five Years After $500K Cruise Scam

A British man who scammed £400,000 (USD$502,000) from more than 200 people via his fake travel business has this week been sentenced to five years in prison. 

Richard Lester, 56, lived the high life in Las Vegas for several years, posing as a wealthy British aristocrat and giving himself the title, “Lord Lester.”

But it was all a sham, built off the back of money scammed from clients of his crooked firm. 

Cruise Direct UK sold “cruise miles,” whereby people paid in installments that eventually would, theoretically, turn into a cruise. But most of his clients never got their cruises, some being turned away by boat operators at port on the day of departure. 

It was 2013 when police believe Lester began his scam from his hometown of Luton, north of London. However, once he got word the British police were investigating his businesses, he moved to Las Vegas and covered his trail. 

The results took police nearly a decade to unravel. He was first charged in 2022. Last week, he was sentenced at Chelmsford Crown Court, where he held his head bowed in the dock as he was given five years in prison.

The Scam

Lester’s original business model was a Ponzi scheme, wherein customers would buy vouchers over three years to pay for a cruise holiday. He would use payments from new customers to pay for the original cruises at a later date. The business did apparently at one point have thousands of legitimate customers, the court heard. However, in 2011, police said, he decided to simply stop booking the promised cruises.

From 2011 to 2014, his company sold $500,000 worth of cruise tickets online to customers in the UK, U.S., Canada, France, New Zealand, and Japan. None of them were ever delivered. 

Some customers were repeatedly denied bookings, as the rate of vouchers to cash constantly changed. Others booked cruises, turned up at the port on the day, and were denied entry to the ship by cruise operators, who said their bookings didn’t exist. 

The Gambling 

While he was scamming people with his travel business, Lester was plowing the illicit funds into online poker and frequent trips to Las Vegas. 

Investigators said Lester owned dozens of bank accounts, as well as cryptocurrency investments. So the full extent of his gambling winnings (or losses) could not be determined. 

After being made aware of escalating complaints against his business from disgruntled customers in 2013, Lester fled the UK and moved to Las Vegas full-time. 

Once there, he used his lavish lifestyle, funded by gambling with money obtained through scams, to convince new clients he was trustworthy and a reliable businessman. After his company was struck off from the UK’s list of registered businesses at Companies House in 2014, Lester returned to the UK to claim innocence in court. 

The Conviction 

Six years of pandemic-delayed legal proceedings later, he was finally arrested and charged in 2022.

“The financial cost for victims was into the thousands of pounds, which Lester frittered away to support his own lifestyle,” said PC Leanne Smith of the UK’s Essex Police in a statement. 

“Despite Lester’s efforts to cover his tracks, we showed he was using multiple bank accounts to move his victim’s money, but it all ultimately remained in his control. This has been a large and complex investigation, with officers gathering dozens of statements from victims.”

Lester appeared in Chelmsford Crown Court in Essex, England, in early December 2024, where he was found guilty of fraudulent trading and concealing criminal property. This week, on February 11, he was sentenced to five years in prison by Judge Alexander Mills. 

‘This was a well-planned and complex fraud carried out over a lengthy period of time, and it was done knowingly and willingly on your part,’ Mills said.