A conman who fleeced his employer out of £1.2 million after pretending he had terminal cancer has been jailed.

Christopher Theile was handed a ten-and-a-half year prison sentence at Snaresbrook Crown Court on Friday (July 28) after being found guilty on three counts of fraud.

The 39-year-old told his employers at USB manufacturer Flashbay he had pancreatic cancer and needed time off work for treatment in January 2013.

However, the fraudster, of Maria’s Gardens, Walthamstow, was lying about the illness and used the medical leave to scam his bosses and a neighbour out of huge sums of money.

Handing out the sentence, Judge John Radford said: “The facts reveal you to be a truly deceitful and dishonest man, who shamelessly defrauded others over your criminal career.

“That experience revealed you to have no scruples whatsoever and told lie after lie in order to deceive others.

“The facts illustrate that you were an intelligent and resourceful man planning long running webs of deceit and dishonesty on people you had no compunction in defrauding.

“You abused the trust of your employer and a number of the work colleagues who you sought to deceive.”

Theile said he had met a businessman, who wanted a large order of bespoke USB drives for a company called Jardines, while receiving treatment at a clinic in Switzerland.

He told Flashbay they could make a profit of up to £300,000 on the deal and taking the bait, the company duly manufactured £1.2 million worth of the products.

But the order did not exist and Theile, running the scam from a Walthamstow internet café, soon demanded £24,000 in commission for the sale alongside the £22,000 he had been given in sick pay.

The court heard one colleague, Christopher Brammer had even coughed up £6,000 of his own savings to help pay for the conman’s fake medical costs.

German-born Theile created a fictional persona called Byran Hawkes, who demanded to be the sole contact between Flashbay and Jardines.

Jardines were in fact a real company based in Hong Kong, yet Theile had embedded in Byran Hawkes’s email address a fake link to a website he had built himself.

Under the alias of Hawkes, Theile led Flashbay on a wild goose chase, concocting excuse after excuse as to why they had not been paid yet.

He told colleague Ralph Bramminger there were trademark problems, production problems, import problems and tariff problems.

Thiele then told Flashbay he had suffered a stroke in January 2014 and later said his cancer was terminal.

The fraud unravelled when Flashbay managing director, Stephen Webster, realised the Jardines website was fake and hired private investigators to track Theile.

They made a citizen’s arrest on September 17, 2014 and he was subsequently charged with fraud.

While on bail, Theile had also used his new-found free time to scam a neighbour and friend out of £66,000.

He told the victim he was a stockbroker and convinced him to invest £66,000 into a fake investment vehicle and a property development in Enfield.

Theile could not resist a joke at his victim's expense, tricking him into paying cash into a company titled “The London Fraud Prevention Club”.

The court was told Theile served four years in a German prison for fleecing three families out of close to €500,000 in 2005.

The fraudster's wife has since left him with their children and moved back to Germany.