An Army major, his wife and a college lecturer were today found guilty of cheating their way to the top prize on the TV quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Disgraced Charles Ingram, 39, tricked game show host Chris Tarrant into signing the million-pound cheque after using an accomplice's coded coughs to help select the answers.

His wife Diana and college lecturer Tecwen Whittock, 53, who did the coughing, were also convicted at London's Southwark Crown Court after almost 14 hours of deliberations over three days.

Diana Ingram, also 39, was found guilty of helping to ''set up'' the scam.

All three escaped jail but were handed hefty fines.

Major Ingram and his wife were sentenced to 18 months in prison, suspended for two years, and each fined £15,000 and ordered to pay £10,000 in costs.

Whittock was sentenced to 12 months in prison, also suspended for two years, and was fined £10,000 and ordered to pay £7,500 in costs.

The Ingrams, of High Street, Easterton, Wiltshire, and Whittock, who lives at Heol-y-Gors, Whitchurch, Cardiff, and is head of business studies at Pontypridd College, south Wales, were each found guilty of one count of ''procuring the execution of a valuable security by deception'' on September 10, 2001.

The verdicts came after Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC told the eight women and three men of the jury he would accept majority decisions.

Ingram, a father of three, scooped the top prize on the game show hosted by Mr Tarrant.

But just hours after walking away with the cheque, studio chiefs became suspicious of his success.

They thought a system of coughs, heard to come from the direction of Tecwen Whittock, a contestant in the ''fastest finger first'' seats, was signalling the correct answers.

Nicholas Hilliard, prosecuting, told the jury that it was only by ''cheating his way'' through the 15 questions he was asked that Ingram was able to win the fortune.

''To state the obvious, you are not allowed to get the prize money... if you are using a scheme which no one knows about to get help from someone else in answering questions.

''You may think it inevitable, human nature being what it is, that where £1 million is regularly on offer, someone somewhere will have thought how it might be possible to improve their chances in getting their hands on the money by cheating.''

He explained that the studio was equipped with a string of microphones. Ten of them were for the benefit of the ''fastest finger'' hopefuls, one of whom would be picked to occupy the hot seat.

Others serviced the contestant and Mr Tarrant.

''It goes without saying that in any large group of people, and here there was space for about 200 people in the audience, in any group of that size you will probably hear a lot of coughs, splutters, throat clearing, or whatever,'' the barrister told the jury.

''If each person did it once only, that would be 200 coughs''.

But after suspicions were raised that Ingram's win was not above board, the programme's sound supervisor, Kevin Duff, analysed the various coughs that had been recorded.

He noted 19 he later described as ''coughs made on mike''.

In his view, they came from one of the ''fastest finger'' microphones.

Police arrested the Ingrams and Whittock, in dawn raids on their homes a few months after the show. They were charged with ''procuring a valuable security by deception''.

Ingram frequently changed his mind as he decided which was the right answer on the show. On several occasions his answers changed after coughs were heard from Whittock.

Mr Hilliard said: ''He got the cheque by pretending he had done it on his own by playing by the rules when the film shows he did nothing of the sort.''

A video of Ingram's apparent success showed him saying at one point that he was relying on a particular ''strategy and counter-strategy''.

But once the £1 million cheque had been handed over, several questions later, Mr Tarrant said: ''I have no idea how you got there. You went to hell and back out there ... I have no idea what your strategy was.''

He then added: ''An amazing human being.''

The court heard that the Ingrams and Whittock had been in contact by phone on a regular basis for several months before Ingram's winning show.

But they ignored each other at the studio.

Whittock admitted that he had a cough at the time and a number of people in the audience noticed it. But he insisted that he had not coughed to help Ingram with the answers.