At Durham Constabulary in September 2020, the switchboard kept receiving calls about mainly one thing – an estate agent called Lyne Barlow. There were just so many calls about Lyne and her activities. It seemed that lots of local people had been booking trips via Lyne Barlow Independent Travel and hadn’t received what they thought they had paid for. And now people were swapping stories on Facebook about their experiences and suspecting they had been scammed – and people weren’t happy, not happy at all.
Due to the demand this placed on the finite resources potentially blocking other emergency calls, Durham Constabulary took the decision to set up an email address just about this one company and then direct complainants to this address. The Economic Crime Unit were also briefed on the situation – this is normally a 5 person team in Durham who deal with the most complex frauds in the area. But due to the sheer volume of complaints about Lyne Barlow travel, an additional 15 people were brought in to help when it was clear this could be big. This team decided to approach the situation by taking contact details of complainants and then using a survey to obtain all the information they needed. An online survey sounds a bit clunky right, but it enabled officers to work with analysts to drill down into what was happening. And being a Uk police force operation it had to have a silly name, and this one was called Operation Wentletrap. During the following 18 months the team looked at all the stories that came in and the numbers were shocking. They reckoned that in the time that Lyne Barlow Independent Travel was in operation selling holidays to destinations both in the UK and across the world between November 2019 and September 2020, more than 450 fraud-related crimes were recorded, with approximately 1,400 victims. The fraud was into the millions.
Hundreds of hours were spent speaking to often highly distressed people understanding exactly what had happened and speaking to banks and travel companies trying to create a timeline of what had happened and when and how the fraud had been able to take place. Within days of the first calls, officers arrested Barlow.
Lyne Barlow seemed very nice and, well, anything but extraordinary. She enjoyed a very normal childhood in a nice, middle-class part of Durham, in the north-east of England, with her mum, dad and sister Lesley. She worked as a travel agent after leaving school – and was good at it – and then met and married her accountant husband Paul when she was in her early 20’s. They had two children and lived in a semi-detached house in Stanley, County Durham. After losing her job at another travel agency in November 2019, it was from her home that she started and ran her business, Lyne Barlow Independent Travel. Most of her marketing was carried out via Facebook where advertised holiday packages to customers, often massively undercutting competitors. When asked why she could offer such great deals she would say that the big players were ripping people off. But it appeared that Barlow was a classic scammer running what in effect was a ponzi scheme – the classic fraud we have covered so often on this podcast. Barlow simply told customers that she could be trusted and their money was safe by falsely claiming that she was ATOL and ABTA protected – the two regulatory authorities covering travel in the Uk. She then persuaded customers to make bank transfers to lock in the big savings by telling them that if they did not pay her immediately, they would risk losing the generous discount she was able to offer them. Some Some customers received the booking – or part of the booking – and were able to travel, if not see out the whole of their trip. But the majority of holidays were never even booked. Barlow simply used new bookings to fund existing bookings. It was a classic ‘Ponzi’ style scheme.
And they didn’t need to look far for a motive – Barlow wanted to live a good life and spent it all on her own lifestyle, lavishing it on parties, holidays, a range rover – of course – and designer clothes – it was reported she had obtained more free clothes than Keir Starmer – although that is of course hard to believe.
When Barlow was arrested, she was suffering from cancer and wore a headscarf due to losing her hair from chemotherapy and walked using the a walking stick. Shockingly, officers checked her medical records which showed she was not ill. And in police interviews she admitted that she didn’t actually have cancer. She had been so convincing in her stories about her illness that her family and other family members thought that she was seriously ill, and some had even dropped her off at hospital for bogus appointments. The lengths she went to with this deception are quite staggering, even began cutting her own hair and leaving it on her bed, so her husband and son and daughter, aged five and four, would think it was falling out due to her chemotherapy. Food shopping would be washed on the doorstep for her to try and minimise the risk of catching Covid-19 which of course could have had a very serious effect on her if her immune system was low due to suffering from cancer. And she happily told people she was in the most dreadful pain, was incontinent and having palliative care.
Officers told her family that she wasn’t sick before Barlow was bailed – I wonder how that conversation went down in the car on the way home? The investigation continued but now that the depths of Barlow’s ability to deceived those closest to her had been revealed, further information started to reach the investigation of how Barlow had borrowed money from several people and encouraged others to invest their savings in her schemes.
Looking more closely at her background officers tried to understand just how someone as ordinary as Lyne Barlow had turned to crime. It would be pinpointed to 2015, when her dad died suddenly at just 58 year old. Her mum, Susan, was of course devastated and in the time of chaos after the death, she relied heavily on her daughter. Susan had a number of payouts from insurance premiums and Barlow put herself in a position where she had control over her mums finances and started siphoning cash into her own account. ‘She was taking regular holidays abroad; she was having lavish parties, and spent well over £500,000 of her mums money at her time of greatest need following the death of her husband. Barlow manipulated her mum so much that she even kept hold of her mail to stop her fraud being discovered. One letter did get through telling Susan she was behind on her mortgage, but when she spoke to her daughter about this, Barlow told her that it was a simple admin error and then covered up the slip by faking a note from the bank showing that there was no money outstanding. All the while she knew that there was a real chance that her mum could have had her house repossessed.
But knowing the funds from her mum were running low and she had to do something to stop everything crashing down, Barlow found a new source of income. She spoke to those people close to her about investing in her husband’s business and getting shares, which would then lead to attractive dividends’. There was just one problem with this scheme and that is that her husband didn’t have a company – it just never existed. But still people were willing to trust Barlow with a friend giving her an astonishing £100,000 and a neighbour passed her £24,000 to invest. But this money didn’t last long and soon these people were asking to see evidence of the promised returns so this is when Barlow started the holiday business – which operated as a fraud from day one.
And it was remarkably easy for Barlow to carry out her fraud. Her company was registered at companies house and she seemed to be registered by ATOL and ABTA – no regulatory red flags here. And we all love a deal don’t we so work quickly spread on facebook and face to face as we can from the following. Daniel Hill spoke to the media saying, ‘My supervisor at work told me he’d booked a holiday to Dubai with Lyne and got a fantastic deal,’. ‘He paid £1,000 for him and his partner for one week, including flights and hotels, which sounded amazing.’ He found this price hard to believe, but after doing the basic research most of us would do he was reassured enough in December 2019 to book a £1,000 package to Dubai for a week the following March with his wife saying, ‘I paid in full, then got an email confirmation with a business heading and an ATOL number,’. He was so impressed that he also recommended it to his parents and in-laws, who booked it, too. ‘So Lyne now had £3,000 from us,’ he said.
When Covid hit, the Dubai trip for March 2020 holiday to Dubai was postponed but when it was clear to him that covid would disrupt travel for a long period of time he naturally asked for a refund. He said, ‘I contacted Lyne, who said she could get the money back, but that she’d got cancer and was receiving treatment, so it might take longer,’. And this was the story Barlow was using with lots of her customers to buy time saying to one who asked for money back: ‘It’s stage 3/4 in my bones and need to have chemo put into my spine to stop it from getting to my brain,’. Daniel felt sorry for her – why wouldn’t you – and wasn’t overly worried at this stage, it all seemed legitimate with covid and Barlow’s illness. ‘I didn’t pressure her too much,’ he said. ‘But after a few weeks, I emailed her and she said she’d been in hospital, which is why she hadn’t replied. ‘At that point, I started doing some investigating and saw a number of Facebook posts asking about her. The sheer number of people made me realise I’d been scammed — and that my parents and in-laws had, too.’
Others did make it to their destinations before the nightmare started. Paul Stocks was one such person who had booked an amazing trip in Turkey for £7000. It was an all-inclusive golfing holiday to Turkey for his wife and two other couples for £7,000, shortly before Lyne was arrested. He later said, ‘We all had some time off at the start of September 2020, and so we arranged something last-minute,’ ‘We booked on Monday to depart on the Friday.’ Things didn’t start well when they all received an email saying the flight was now going from Manchester rather than Newcastle and would be leaving a day after it was scheduled. Paul continued, ‘One of my friends went to see Lyne at home. She was wearing a cancer bandana and said she had had treatment that morning,’ ‘She apologised profusely and said she would get us into the business lounge.’ And she pulled it out of the bag booking the party into the lounge and then when they arrived at the resort in Turkey it was amazing, just as they had hoped. But then disaster struck just 4 days into the holiday when the manager of the resort called them to his office to tell them that Barlow had only paid for three nights accommodation, not the 14 days they had expected. The group would have to stump up almost £9000 to stay for the duration. ‘We didn’t have that kind of money,’ Paul recalls. ‘We were miles from home and literally didn’t know what to do, as a lot of places were closed due to Covid,’ he continued. Luckily a local let them stay whilst they searched for a cheap flight home.. ‘Lyne told us she would email our return boarding passes, but that didn’t happen,’ says Paul. But by now it was July 2021 and Barlow had been arrested again. When police went to arrest Barlow at her then home address, there were two groups of customers there and understandably none were happy. “Some were angry and concerned,” “Others were relatively sympathetic towards her, saying she had cancer.”
This time it appeared she could see no way that she could continue to lie and during interviews she admitted offences relating to loans and investment fraud, together with the holiday fraud. The Crown Prosecution Service were happy with the evidence gathered and gave the go-ahead to charge Barlow at the start of 2022.
Facing trial at Durham Crown Court, Lyne Barlow pleaded guilty to one count of theft, 10 counts of fraud by misrepresentation and one count of concealing, converting, and transferring criminal property. The fraud was estimated at £1.2m, although the money she had received all in all reached a much higher figure of £2.6m.
The court heard a number of victim impact statements in which people talked about how Barlow’s actions had affected them. They included people now on anxiety medication, sleepless nights, acute feelings of embarrassment and trust issues following being ripped off in such a shocking manner.
The defending counsel had a tricky brief. There was no psychiatric defence. He told the court how Barlow had undergone 80 hours of counselling and no root cause had been identified for her crimes. The holiday fraud was an enterprise which he said was always “doomed to failure”. He said her crimes has left Barlow a “broken, beaten, penniless woman” who apologised to every victim – “and of course there are many”.
The judge Jailed Barlow, now aged 39, for nine years. Looking directly at Barlow, she told her how she had “an extraordinary talent for dishonesty” and was a “thoroughly callous individual” telling her You have obviously presented yourself to those who knew you as a charming and engaging woman.
“You are clearly a woman of significant intellectual abilities but you have an extraordinary talent for dishonesty.”
“You mercilessly abused the trust of your nearest and dearest in their darkest hours. You set about targeting other vulnerable people of your acquaintance and who trusted you to satisfy your need for a relatively lavish lifestyle,”. She told her that the worst thing was how she told her husband Paul and their two children she had cancer and was dying.
She said of how she had treated her mum, : “In my view, this particular deception had two main aims. The first was to emotionally blackmail your mother so that you could avoid any scrutiny by her of your dishonesty. “The second was to isolate your mother from family, from the world. “When we went into lockdown, she could not go shopping because she was terrified that she could bring Covid to her terminally ill daughter. “It was the most callous and calculated act.”
Barlow was in floods of tears as she was taken down to the cells. As she was in the police van on the way to spend her first night in prison, police released mugshots of her pretending to have lost her hair through chemo therapy when first arrested in September 2020, then with fantastically, flawless, flowing locks after the truth came out.
Outside court Detective Sergeant Alan Meehan said: “Fraud is a horrendous crime and Barlow’s actions were appalling.“She made a conscious and deliberate decision to do what she did. There were points at which she could have put a stop to it all, but she carried on and now she is now paying the price for her actions.
“Sadly, so many people have been affected by what she did, lives have been changed forever and some will never be the same again.
“Not only did Barlow offer holidays she could not deliver, but she also took advantage of the generosity and understanding of those around her, which has resulted in such far-reaching consequences.
“She wanted a quality of life she could not afford, which resulted in her defrauding her family, friends, and even complete strangers.
It was later revealed that Barlows husband and children have now moved home away from the area.
We have all heard of people faking illness a number of times on this podcast and scamming family and friends. But to tell your husband and two young children you are dying of cancer and to steal over £500,000 when her husband has just unexpectedly died – well, it is pretty hard to believe that anyone could stoop this low isn’t it. You do wonder what someone as cold and callous as this may have done in their earlier life – surely not much is off the table if you are able to lie so easily without caring about those who are the very closest to you.
I can’t imagine how I would have felt each time the text or call came through asking me about details of what had gone wrong, can you? It is bad enough facing reviews after a free podcast every week, but when people have paid you all that hard earned money to make their holiday dreams come true and then letting them down, well. There was one devastating account from February 2020 when a young couple had been told that their middle son, who had been born with a life-limiting disability, had only months to live. They booked a weeks holiday, fearing it may be the last time they could go away as a family of five. The mum, Shelley, was quoted as saying, ‘He’d just come out of intensive care, where we’d already nearly lost him,’ ‘We’d been told he didn’t have long, so we decided we wanted to make some memories for him and our other children. That’s when I picked up the phone.’ ‘We were devastated and just wanted to make his last weeks the happiest we could,’ she says. Center Parcs was an obvious choice, as it involved no complex travel and had specially adapted lodges for those with particular needs.
‘I asked Lyne if she could take on the arrangements for a week’s holiday as my head was spinning,’ Shelley recalls. ‘She called back and said she had managed to get an incredible deal: instead of £2,500 for one week, she could get us a fortnight for £3,000.
‘I was a bit sceptical, but she was incredibly empathetic, and convinced me it was the right thing to do — obviously, she played on my vulnerability, and I didn’t question her credibility because of my friend’s recommendation.’
Shelley paid all the money but when a few days later she hadn’t received confirmation she chased.
‘Barlow replied saying, ‘My mistake, I’ll get it to you straight away,’ but then another week went by, so I messaged her again,’ Shelley recalls. She received just an amateur document back.
‘It didn’t have any of her company details on it, no registered address — anyone could have typed it. I emailed back, saying that I didn’t mean to be rude, but it didn’t look like an official booking. Then, when I asked for further confirmation, she stopped replying to any of my messages,’ says Shelley.
‘I contacted my friend and asked if all was OK with her upcoming trip to Florida, and learned that Lyne wasn’t returning her calls either. Then, a few days later, she called me and told me Lyne been arrested for fraud.’
Shelley burst into tears as she said. ‘It wasn’t the holiday, but the fact that she knew my world had fallen apart, and she still felt able to do this to me,’ she says. ‘The children had their bags packed and I had to explain they couldn’t go. They were devastated.’
How could anyone do that? I guess she will have plenty of time to think about it in her cell. And does she still have a relationship with her mum, husband or children? And what will become of her when she is released? It is hard to see how any of these relationships can be repaired. Isn’t it?
This story was released as Episode 409 of the UK true Crime Podcast, The Travel Agent.
The sources used are below:
https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/travel-agent-jailed-defrauding-customers-fund-lavish-lifestyle#:~:text=Lyne%20Barlow%2C%20aged%2039%2C%20formerly,Court%20on%203%20February%202023.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-64510731
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/dodgy-travel-agent-lyne-barlow-26137200
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11751525/Victims-reveal-travel-agent-Lyne-Barlow-faked-terminal-cancer-stole-millions-holiday-scam.html
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/03/fraud-travel-agent-pretended-to-have-cancer-jailed-nine-years-durham-lyne-barlow
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-mirror/20230204/285031218518144?srsltid=AfmBOopFxQ9m39eLD_DYLXJjl7YlM46bmx-dKStf5gleOOCdaquqTllZ