A CONMAN who swindled charities and businesses out of almost £700,000 is to repay just £1 after a financial investigation discovered he had blown all the money on gambling and high living.

Gavin Dalglish ran a succession of different swindles including one in which he fleeced an estate agent out of £500,000.

He used 23 different names and sent fake e-mails purporting to come from two of Google’s most senior executives.

His victims included businesses and charities which paid him to improve their listings in Google searches but got nothing in return.

He also ripped off a newspaper group that publishes titles in East Devon when he worked for them as an advertising seller. He diverted £13,000 into his own account by doctoring invoices.

The publishers were left out of pocket because they honoured the agreements and printed the advertisements without receiving any payment.

Dalglish spent the money on luxury travel, gambling, designer clothes and cocaine. An investigation found he had no assets left, Exeter Crown Court was told.

Judge Peter Johnson approved an agreed Proceeds of Crime order which set his benefit from criminal conduct at £690,826.53 and his available assets at nil.

The judge made an order for a nominal payment of £1 with a day in custody in default.

Dalglish, aged 39, of Brunswick Terrace, Teignmouth, admitted three counts of fraud, three of false accounting and one of concealing criminal property and was jailed for five years and four months in March.

He has previous convictions for fraud and moved to Devon under a false name after being released from an earlier jail sentence. He was described as a ‘career conman’ at his sentencing hearing.

The new set of frauds started in 2011 when he set up a company called Websearch UK in a friend’s name and contacted surveyor Robert Gascoigne-Pees while using the alias David McDonald.

Over the next five years, he extracted more than 1,500 different payments, some for advertising or internet puffing services or as payments which were supposed to free up refunds.

He claimed Websearch had been taken over by Google and posed as senior executives of the company to add to his credibility.

At one stage Mr Gascoigne-Pees went in person to Google’s London offices to try to check him out failed to get an answer.

Dalglish also swindled other customers by claiming to work for Infoserve and getting them to pay money into his account.

By 2016, he was in Devon, where he funnelled cash intended to pay for newspaper adverts into his own account.

He worked briefly for Archant, which publishes the Exmouth Journal, and Midweek and Sidmouth Herald papers.

He sold adverts but diverted the payments to his own account by changing the payment details on invoices.

He went on to do exactly the same thing on a smaller scale while claiming to work for the SearchforLocal website and ended up working as a salesman for the Exeter based Thirsty Work, where he took orders worth more than £4,000 and pocketed the cash.

The firms honoured the agreements he made and ended up out of pocket.