A WALTER MITTY-STYLE conman who claimed to have the Midas touch with the stock market blew hundreds of thousands of pounds on a luxury lifestyle.

Malcolm Varrick, 29, was last night beginning a four-year jail sentence after making massive losses on the futures and options market and spending the rest of his clients' money on expensive hotels, suits and fast cars.

Between 1998 and 2000 he owned 19 high-performance sports cars, including five Porsches, three Ferraris and three Aston Martins worth nearly £1m.

Victims of the get-rich-quick scheme included a former group secretary of the National Farmers Union, John Rees Reynolds, and an unnamed London physician.

Newcastle Crown Court how Mr Reynolds eventually lost £149,000 and the retired physician £120,000 from his pension.

Prosecutor John Hardy said the pair were initially paid interest payments on their investments and were then "groomed" by Varrick into investing more.

The scheme, funded by deposits from investors intended as collateral for trading, lost more than £1m.

Varrick, who opened a Swiss bank account, attracted investors by advertising a computer program claiming to help people trade on the stock markets.

He later set up a series of impressive sounding companies including Charterhouse Trading Company Limited and Carrington Asset Management Limited.

He also paid two Durham University students £24,000 a year to work from his office in Ferens Park, Durham City.

Varrick, formerly of Front Street, Sacriston, County Durham, and now of Quarry Road, Hereford, admitted ten charges of obtaining a money transfer by deception and ten of false accounting between 1999 and 2000.

Christopher Campbell-Cline, mitigating, said: "There was an element of the Walter Mitty about this.

"He believed he had some sort of Midas touch and could make magical decisions about investments.

Detective Inspector Colin Gibson, head of County Durham police's economic crime unit, said: "Unfortunately, he has no assets left which we could seize from him and, although when his accounts were frozen a small amount of money was recovered and paid to creditors, that in no way reflects the huge amount of money that they lost."