“George” – as he called himself – told the 39-year-old estate agent that he was an attorney for the Saudi royal family with property interests in an exclusive enclave of Marbella, near her home on Spain’s Costa del Sol.

“He told me he had a building plot and that we could start a new life when he sold all of his investments,” she recalls.

However the charismatic George was in fact Mark Acklom, Britain’s most wanted con artist, and the only thing he wanted from Elena was her money. She became suspicious before she handed over any of her cash but others were not so lucky.

Sought in various countries, Acklom, 44 – who has also used the names Mark Ros, Ros Marc Rodriquez, Mark Desmond and Dr Zac Moss among others – has spent 10 years behind bars in Britain and Spain and defrauded dozens of people by variously claiming to be a property developer, secret agent, banker, lawyer or gynaecologist.

He is on the run under a new identity – Marc Long – and is now believed to be living in Switzerland with his wife Maria Yolanda Ros Rodriguez, 47, and their two daughters, aged eight and six, after cheating vulnerable divorcee Carolyn Woods out of life savings worth £850,000.

He posed as an MI6 agent and promised to marry her.

A European arrest warrant has been issued following news that he used his latest identity to get a new passport and Swiss residency permit in 2014.

Having honed his nefarious techniques on Elena in 2011, the following year he was ready to ruthlessly exploit Carolyn Woods, 55, after he strode into her Gloucestershire boutique to buy a jacket and coolly told her that he was a Swiss banker visiting the UK to buy a Cotswold air eld.

Charmed by his charisma they began a relationship. “The air around him was electric,” she has said. “I was caught up in a whirlwind of excitement.

There are no photographs of us together because he said his MI6 handlers would not allow it because of his security,” she says of a man who impressed her with his taste for the high life.

He liked to travel first class and drive Porsches, Maseratis and BMWs but the cars were mostly leased and if bills were settled it was rarely with his own money.

When Carolyn overheard him talking about business debts she offered him £26,000, a figure that gradually extended to more than £850,000.

“In the end I lent him everything I had,” says Carolyn, who left her job and moved in with him. “By the time I had given up my independence I was a prisoner.”

When he vanished with all her money her devastated daughters were convinced she had been brainwashed.

In March 2016, after being released from prison for a property scam being carried out at the time he was bombarding Elena with messages, Acklom disappeared once again.

Since then Britain’s most prolific fraudster has been on the run.

His long history of fraud dates back to his school days when as a brazen teenager he stole his father’s Gold American Express card and used it to rack up more than £1million of debt including hiring private jets and shopping at Harrods.

With the sangfroid of a man twice his age he entertained friends at lap-dancing club Stringfellows, wining and dining them on Dom Perignon and lobster.

He was even able to convince the Leeds Permanent Building Society he was a £214,000-a-year City broker and persuaded them to give him a mortgage to buy a £500,000 house in Dulwich in London.

Admitting the fraud offences in court in 1991 at the age of 18 the judge called him “ruthless” and even his own barrister described him as a Walter Mitty fantasist with a “disturbed and complex mind”.

He was sentenced to four years in youth custody – he served two – and asked for 119 similar offences to be taken into consideration.

These did not include the theft of his mother’s mink coat which he had sold to help fund his lifestyle.

“He denied it but it couldn’t have been anyone else,” says his mother Diana, who wonders if a brain injury at birth might have caused her son’s sociopathic behaviour.

During the trial Hamish Bett, who was in his year at school, told his local paper that Acklom had been bullied at school and would pretend to be a stock broker who would “put on a posh accent... he used to make fake calls saying, ‘Buy three million of this and eight million of that’.”

His scams grew ever more polished and he became ever more addicted to his duplicitous lifestyle. Speaking to a Spanish paper, Elena Escuverra says she believes Acklom will carry on committing fraud “until the day he dies”.

She adds: “It’s like a sick game to him. I just hope no one else falls for it.

Elena’s details have been changed to protect her identity.