A COUPLE were jailed for conning thousands of women into paying up to £159 for a new slimming drug then selling them repacked vitamin pills costing £2.39.

Their sales claims guaranteed a weight loss of 10lb to 15lb in the first month, but analyst Professor John Garrow, who tested the pills, dismissed the claims as unbelievable, Teesside Crown Court heard.

Many of the customers of the company, Regional Health and Diet Centre, were from North Yorkshire.

The court heard on Friday that trading standards investigators who raided the couple's base in Camden, London, found thousands of empty tablet bottles from chain store Superdrug.

Madjide Khalik, 40, and actress Marcella Hymes, 33, also set up their own debt recovery business to scare women into paying up even though they had not ordered the pills, said Deborah Sherwin, prosecuting.

One victim reported them to North Yorkshire trading standards after she began to put on weight. She telephoned the firm and was told to keep taking the tablets.

There were so many complaints being investigated from its target area in North Yorkshire that the couple set up South West Diet to spread their sales to Somerset, the court heard.

Company records seized from the offices showed they had 6,000 customers and sales orders of £370,000.

Khalik and Hymes started out legitimately selling diet sheets, but when their business was failing they cleared the Superdrug shelves of vitamin pills, said Miss Sherwin, acting for North Yorkshire trading standards.

Khalik, of Hampstead, was jailed for 12 months after he pleaded guilty to three charges of conspiracy to defraud between April 1999 and May 2000, and two charges of acting in the management of a company when disqualified for eight years in November 1998.

Hymes, of Brixton, was jailed for six months after she admitted the three conspiracy charges.