A British conman who scammed more than 180 cruise passengers out of over £400,000 has been sentenced to five years in prison for fraudulent trading and money laundering.
Richard Lester, 56, of Swifts Green Road in Luton, was found guilty at Chelmsford Crown Court on 17th December 2024, following a nine-week trial.
Judge Alexander Mills handed down the sentence on 11th February 2025, after prosecutors detailed how Lester orchestrated a Ponzi-style scheme that left victims stranded at ports with no booked cruises.
A cruise scheme built on lies
Lester ran a fraudulent business selling so-called ‘cruise miles’ under the companies Cruisevoucher and later Cruisemiles, promising heavily discounted luxury cruises.
Customers would purchase these miles, which were meant to be exchanged for cruises through his website, but instead, their money was used to fund previous customers’ holidays.
Between 2009 and 2011, Cruisevoucher operated as a voucher-based system where customers paid in advance for cruises, often years ahead.
The money they spent was then used to pay for earlier customers’ bookings.
In 2011, Lester rebranded the company as Cruisemiles, shifting to a loyalty scheme where customers could buy miles to later exchange for cruise bookings.
However, as the scheme progressed, customers found that the number of miles required for bookings continually increased, making it harder to redeem them.
Meanwhile, Lester stopped booking cruises altogether, keeping the money for himself while luring in new victims through misleading offers and recruiting previous buyers as agents to sell more miles.
Many only discovered they had been scammed when they arrived at ports expecting to embark on their trips, only to be turned away by cruise lines that had no record of their reservations.
Victims from across the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France, Germany, and Japan came forward after losing thousands of pounds in Lester’s scheme.
Complaints led the UK’s National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) to alert Essex Police in July 2013, triggering a decade-long investigation.
PC Leanne Smith, who worked on the case since 2014, described the operation as a “large and complex investigation”, involving financial tracking across multiple accounts.
“All their money leads back to Lester. His greed left hundreds of people thousands of pounds out of pocket,
“They were tricked into committing more and more money to his scheme, unaware that money was going directly into Lester’s pocket.”
PC Leanne Smith
Lester lived extravagantly using funds from his victims, splurging on online poker websites and other business ventures while marketing himself under various aliases, including Henry Lester, Les Richards, Lord Lester, Richie Lescovitch, and Barry Williams.
At sentencing, Judge Mills described him as a “professional gambler” who had been “living the high life in Las Vegas” while his victims faced financial losses.
Lester was handed two concurrent five-year sentences – one for fraudulent trading and another for money laundering.
The court has also scheduled an additional hearing on 20th October 2025, to determine whether any of the stolen funds can be recovered and returned to victims.
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Jenni Fielding is the founder of Cruise Mummy. She has worked in the cruise industry since 2015 and has taken over 30 cruises. Now, she helps over 1 million people per month to plan their perfect cruise holidays.
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