Additional reporting by James Pallant and Gerry Warren
A “greedy and manipulative” gambler fleeced family, friends and teammates out of life-changing sums of money as he blew more than £4 million on betting sites.
Kenny Sanders convinced some of those closest to him to part with their savings, inheritances and pension pots, assuring them he was investing their cash in a thriving IT company.
Kenny Sanders, from Canterbury, fleeced friends out of life-changing sums of money as he blew more than £4 million on betting sites
But behind the façade of a successful businessman with “houses, cars, watches, designer clothes and holidays”, was a gambling addict using the money to fund his lavish lifestyle and to bet online for 18 hours a day.
One lifelong friend who trusted him with his retirement fund spoke of being “brought to the edge mentally and physically many times” by the 38-year-old’s deception.
Another victim described feeling “devastated, terrified, desperate and suicidal”, while others were left shunned by relatives who blamed them for encouraging investments.
Over three years, Sanders, who lives near Canterbury, admitted swindling nine people out of almost £1.4 million, leaving them in financial, emotional and even physical ruin.
The impact was so severe that one football teammate lost his home, and a mother said she could not even afford to buy her children school shoes after losing everything she had invested.
Sanders eventually called police and confessed to his crimes, with investigators discovering the dad of two had gambled a staggering £10 million with online betting companies over the same time period, including PaddyPower and Bet365.
A judge told him today that prison was the only suitable punishment for the devastation he had inflicted on so many lives.
The fraud
At the start of a two-day sentencing hearing yesterday, Canterbury Crown Court was told Sanders’ crimes spanned the period between 2015 and 2018.
Knowing he is going to prison, fraudster Kenny Sanders says goodbye to his family outside Canterbury Crown Court on Thursday morning. Picture: Barry Goodwin
Prosecutor David Hewitt explained the case concerned a business Sanders ran – Green Source IT Ltd.
“He was involved in buying and selling IT equipment at a profit,” he said.
“It came to a stage where he encouraged people to invest in that business. Certain people did invest on the understanding their investment would bring dividends.
“It would appear he was a gambling addict, certainly during this period and, in part, he used the monies invested with him to gamble rather than invest in his business.
“He was paying some returns to investors from his work and business but, ultimately, as the court is aware, the victims suffered losses – and quite sizeable losses.”
Referring to Sanders’ confession to police – and before any victims had themselves reported any financial wrongdoing – Mr Hewitt said: “On August 7, 2018, the defendant called Kent Police and he self-reported that he had been using his company, as he put it, ‘to steal large amounts of money’ from friends, family and the wider public in order to fund his gambling habit.
“He set out, in short, what had happened, referring to setting up a company which he used to trade with clients, asking victims for funds to invest in the business, enabling him to buy and sell IT equipment to clients which, according to victims’ evidence, included NHS trusts and police forces.
“He said to police he had in fact lost victims’ funds through a gambling addiction. He was unable to state the exact amount of money, but at the time he said it was millions of pounds.
“In fact, it was some millions of pounds he had lost.”
Mr Hewitt said police checks showed that as of August 2018, no reports of fraud had been made by any of the victims in the case.
The best friend
Close pal Nick Green was the biggest loser in terms of financial loss reflected in the charges that Sanders ultimately admitted.
Best friend Nick Green, from Whitstable, is among Kenny Sanders’ victims; from an overall investment of £835,000, he lost more than £423,000
He was first approached by Sanders and a business associate, named in proceedings as Ranj Chahal, in 2015 and asked to invest with a promise of receiving a third of their 12.5% profit in return.
About 18 months later, Mr Green was assured that the company was making that profit every other month and, on that basis, he handed over an initial investment of £30,000.
The court heard he did receive money back in the early stages, resulting in him investing more “significant” sums with the same agreement.
Some of his available funds had been generated from the sale of a property for £1.2 million, of which just under a quarter was given to Sanders.
Cash amounts between £30,000 and £90,000 were also handed to his friend in what were termed “flip” deals with the promise of higher and quicker returns.
When Mr Green – a builder by trade – asked questions about the business, he was given assurances from Sanders, which included claims he was supplying IT equipment to the NHS and police, Mr Hewitt told the court.
However, the prosecutor added that from an overall investment of £835,000 between January 2015 and July 2018, he lost “some £423,000 plus”.
In a victim impact statement summarised to the court, Mr Green spoke of his “anger, frustration and utter despair”.
He said the money he lent to his one-time friend was his life savings and only source of pension fund, having worked six days a week for 35 years.
As well as not being able to retire as he had hoped, he said that being defrauded “so heartlessly by someone I regarded as my best friend” had “brought me to the edge mentally and physically many times”.
Describing Sanders’ business as “a charade”, Mr Green said everything he had worked for had been “cruelly ripped” from under him.
“It was being frittered away without a care in the world quicker than I could earn income,” he added.
The court was told learning of the deception left him suffering from anxiety, depression and panic attacks, as well as exacerbating a pre-existing heart condition.
“As a result of being a victim of this crime, I feel I’m half the person I was before,” Mr Green concluded.
Speaking to KentOnline after the hearing, he added: “It’s killed me. Everything I’ve worked for since I was 16 has vanished.”
Family left with nothing
Other victims included another business partner, Gavin Pereira, along with his wife Claire, and his parents Jean and Peter Pereira.
Gavin and Claire Pereira were urged by Kenny Sanders to invest in his company as a “business opportunity” – but they “lost everything”
Gavin and Claire Pereira invested £79,000 in Sanders’ firm, with the promise of a 7.5% return.
However, by 2017, money was not being repaid “in a timely manner”, said Mr Hewitt, and Sanders “appeared elusive, coming up with more excuses” and ultimately telling the couple his bank accounts had been frozen.
Mr Hewitt told the court that although they did receive money “in dribs and drabs”, the effect on them was “dramatic”.
Addressing the court in person, Mrs Pereira explained how Sanders “sold” his company to her and her husband as a “business opportunity” and advised them “to encourage friends and family” to invest.
Having set up their own business to solely accept investment payments from others, she said Sanders knew the money was coming from people associated with her and her husband and had “actively encouraged it”.
She also told the court that every time they sought assurances, Sanders told them the investments were secure.
Speaking of the devastating consequences they faced, Mrs Pereira said she and her husband “lost everything” and are “only just beginning to claw back” their lives.
She detailed how she was left unable to afford to buy her children school shoes and how her parents had to help out with food shopping.
As well as suffering from depression, Mrs Pereira said her husband was left with a sense of guilt, having been the third party through whom others invested.
She also spoke of the hurt and distress they felt when family and friends “stopped talking” to them and were “questioning and doubting”, but how, when they finally learned of the deceit, they felt compelled to help those who lost financially through them.
Speaking to KentOnline after the hearing, Mrs Pereira added: “I hate him. He ruined us financially.”
Mr Pereira’s parents, Peter and Jean Pereira, invested £75,000, of which they received nothing in return and, said Mr Hewitt, “as far as they were concerned, the defendant disappeared in 2018”.
In her impact statement, Jean Pereira said Sanders had caused “misery” to her family.
“He is a clever, greedy, manipulative person who used trust and friendship for his own gain,” she wrote.
“He watched my son get deeper and deeper in trouble while he and his family enjoyed an extravagant lifestyle.”
Teammates deceived
Another victim was Adam Woollcott, who met Sanders in 2017 while playing for the Rising Sun football team in Herne Bay.
Kenny Sanders lining up for Rising Sun in the 2016 Kent Reliance Sunday Premier Cup final. Picture: Martin Apps
“He became aware others were investing in the defendant’s company and in October 2017 the defendant approached him with an investment proposal, promising to pay 10 to 15% return within four to six weeks,” explained Mr Hewitt.
After an initial investment of £2,000, he handed over a further £56,000, but when he wanted to take some money out, he was met with excuses.
It was in December 2018 – four months after Sanders’ police confession – that Mr Woollcott received an email from him, stating he had “nothing to pay anyone at the moment” but intended to do so as soon as he could.
Apologising, Sanders then revealed his gambling addiction, saying: “Please don’t think I’m not concerned about people’s wellbeing because I’m sorry you are the one having to deal with this.
“I genuinely had a gambling addiction and I hope nobody thinks otherwise.
“I was, and am, in a terrible place having unintentionally affected so many people and my own family.”
In his statement, Mr Woollcott said he had put his “utmost trust” in someone he regarded to be a friend.
Not only did he invest inheritance money but also took out loans. He said the resulting financial strain had been “overwhelming”, and the emotional impact of being conned had left him in “an incredibly dark place”.
“I have lost everything – my car, my house – and I have been left in debt,” Mr Woollcott explained, adding that Sanders knew of the “deep, personal value” of the money he had given to him.
The court heard another victim, Jack Delo, also knew Sanders, regarded him as being successful with a lifestyle to match, and went on to invest more than £31,000.
Having received a little over £1,200 a month for five months, he then learned his money had been squandered on gambling.
Mr Delo told police of the strain placed on his relationship with his wife, and having to put their plans to start a family on hold because of wanting to be in a better financial situation.
Another friend, Sean Smith, had known Sanders for some 10 years when he invested £60,000, only to lose approximately £36,000.
He told police he thought he was investing in “a successful company run by an apparently honest person”.
‘He lied to my face’
Sanders’ deceit also stretched to a US resident, Gina Rubenstein, who had met him in the summer of 2017 through an associate named in court as Andrew Searle.
Prolific fraudster Kenny Sanders, who left his victims hundreds of thousands of pounds out of pocket to fund his gambling addiction and lifestyle, leaving Canterbury Crown Court on the first day of his sentencing hearing
She invested a total of £270,000 – three-quarters of her life savings built up over 40 years – of which she lost £228,000.
The court heard Ms Rubenstein, who is in her late 60s, had even flown to the UK from her home in California to meet Sanders, “look him in the eye” and check out the business.
“Cool as you like, he lied to my face and told me my retirement money was safe with him,” she recalled in her subsequent statement to police.
She also detailed being left “devastated, terrified, desperate and suicidal”, and how she had gone from someone who “vigorously exercised” to using a walker.
Describing herself as feeling “hopeless and doomed”, she added that Sanders’ deceit would “probably be my death”.
The confession
Sanders was interviewed by police two days after he called to admit to his crimes. He spoke of how his addiction “spiralled out of control, gambling from 7am until 1am the following morning” and “took over” his life.
Kenny Sanders gambled a staggering £10 million with online betting companies, including PaddyPower and Bet365
He also acknowledged he had “done wrong and ruined a lot of people’s lives”, including his family’s, and described how he was in the bookmaker’s “from an early age”, watching his father gamble.
“I have gambled ever since,” Sanders explained. “The more money became available to me, the more I was gambling.”
The court was told he had previously set up a similar business but “shut it down” due to his betting and because he “didn’t have the funds for taxes”.
But he told police his intention when he set up Green Source IT was to “genuinely earn 100% profit” on the business deals he made, not for people to invest in and for him to gamble their money.
He said although money was “not being thrown” at him, it became “very easy” for others to invest and within a year of establishing that second business, the fraud began.
But Sanders added he had every intention to pay people back.
He also told police that had Mr Green asked for his original capital back, he would have been “in serious trouble”, and that he used some of the money people invested to repay interest to others.
The court heard that when interviewed by police for a second time in October 2020, he was asked about “his lifestyle, a plan to develop property, a Range Rover Sport he had and a small amount of euros found at his address”.
However, no further details were given during the hearing.
But Mr Hewitt did explain the extent of Sanders’ “compulsive and addictive” gambling habit, the police having made inquiries with betting companies and the Gambling Commission.
“In short, it showed that over the material time, some £10 million-plus was transferred from the defendant’s personal account to the various betting accounts and, over the same period, some £5.7m was transferred back into his account, with a net loss of some £4.3m,” he said.
“No doubt that’s the loss the defendant was referring to during those interviews.”
Kenny Sanders was sentenced at Canterbury Crown Court
Sanders pleaded guilty to seven offences of fraud by false representation relating to nine people and one of fraudulent trading between January 2015 and July 2018.
Four other charges of fraud by false representation involving separate alleged victims were ordered to be left on the court file.
Neither Mr Chahal nor Mr Searle were charged.
It was accepted by Sanders’ legal team that the total amount obtained by way of fraud was £1.384 million, with an overall loss to the victims of £796,000.
Sanders will face confiscation proceedings at a later date.
Plea for leniency
As well as facing maximum sentences of 10 years’ imprisonment for both fraud by false misrepresentation and fraudulent trading, the prosecution sought the imposition of a director’s disqualification order and a serious crime prevention order.
Kenny Sanders outside Canterbury Crown Court on Thursday morning. Picture: Barry Goodwin
In mitigation, Danny Moore KC submitted that the court should take into account Sanders’ guilty pleas, character references highlighting his “positive aspects”, including his “tireless” work in the local boxing community, and the six-year “inordinate and inexplicable” delay from confessing to police to being charged in 2024.
He also argued that Sanders’ gambling disorder was a mental health condition recognised in law as being one which reduced his culpability.
But having declared that Sanders was “profoundly sorry and remorseful”, Mr Moore said it was accepted that an immediate jail term was inevitable.
“He recognises the significant financial and emotional pain caused to the victims in this case, the people who trusted him,” he told Judge Simon James.
“I hope Your Honour will accept he understands this is a case not just about money but years of hard work. It is about dreams and losses.
“He doesn’t offer excuses. He accepts his responsibility. He accepts his choices, albeit we submit, his choices were affected by recognised mental health conditions.”
Mr Moore also spoke of his client’s “commitment to making restitution”, saying that monies were not only paid back during the course of the fraud but also afterwards, and that repaying the victims remained his “ambition”.
“He lives with the knowledge of the harm he has caused to the victims and, indeed, to his own family,” continued the barrister.
“He carries that burden with him, but he accepts that burden is nothing in comparison to the burden felt by the victims. Their burden, he accepts, is real and his remorse is also real.”
A psychiatric report detailed how Sanders had explained that the gambling was done “in a desperate effort to recoup losses” with the pressure becoming “unbearable” as people “chased him” for money.
He was pushed into severe depression, with feelings of guilt and self-loathing, the court was told, and the compulsive nature of his gambling “likely impaired” his ability to make rational decisions and hindered impulse control.
But Mr Moore said Sanders had taken steps to address his addiction and no longer gambled.
The court was also told that he had continued to work, although it was not said in what field, and was living in rented accommodation, having initially “left Kent under a cloud” to live in Nottingham.
Urging Judge James to impose the shortest jail term possible, the lawyer concluded: “This will be his first sentence of imprisonment and it will bear heavily upon him.
“He appreciates, and has always appreciated, the damage he has done.”
The sentence
The courtroom was packed this morning with both Sanders’ family and friends, as well as those he deceived, to hear Judge James pass sentence.
Judge Simon James told Sanders his dishonesty has “ruined lives”
Jailing the fraudster for six years to sobs from some of those in support, he told him his “concerted course of dishonesty and callous breach of trust” had had “profound and permanent” consequences.
“In essence, you sought investments, often from friends and their families with no intention of utilising the money obtained to pursue legitimate business opportunities,” said Judge James.
“Instead, you used their money as if it were your own, gambling much of it and utilising some of your winnings to repay investors in an attempt to keep from being discovered.
“Your offending clearly involved a high degree of abuse of trust, with many of those who were defrauded being close friends and their families.
“With you brazenly telling those, like Ms Rubenstein who had invested her life savings with you, that their money was safe, when you knew full well it was lost.”
The judge continued: “In addition to gambling, it is also apparent that you were enjoying a lavish lifestyle involving expensive cars, watches, designer clothes and holidays.
“By the time you finally realised that the game was up and confessed your fraud to the police, your victims were left with substantial losses.”
The court heard that although Sanders made efforts to repay his victims, the exact sums “did not come anywhere close to full reparation” and remain in dispute.
Of the impact on those he defrauded, Judge James said they had described “understandable feelings of betrayal” having lost life savings and been plunged into debt and uncertainty.
“Quite apart from the obvious and serious financial loss, it is clear that many have suffered permanent and significant health issues having discovered your callous breach of trust, and have been forced to deal with the stress and strain of dealing with the dramatic consequences of their losses,” he told Sanders.
“Putting it bluntly, your dishonesty has ruined lives and the ramifications of your offending upon your multiple victims has been both profound and permanent.
“This was a persistent deception, where you cynically abused the trust of multiple victims and where the fraudulent activity was conducted over a sustained period of time.
“The harm caused clearly goes well beyond the significant financial losses, with each of your victims having suffered serious detrimental effects and psychological harm.”
Mitigation, the judge continued, was derived from his guilty pleas – albeit not all at the first opportunity – the efforts to repay his victims and his gambling addiction.
But he also said that while the crook’s disorder contributed to his “irresponsible and reckless” conduct, it provided “not a crumb of comfort” to the victims and did “little if anything” to reduce the harm caused.
Judge James also highlighted how his diagnosis was “limited” in reducing the sentence imposed by comparing it to a rapist who professes to have a sex addiction.
“A heightened desire for sexual stimulation can’t justify sexual acts without consent any more than a desire to gamble can justify theft,” he said.
He was also scathing on the issue of remorse, telling Sanders he had demonstrated “a rather unattractive focus on your circumstances rather than any real insight into the pain and suffering caused”.
The delay in proceedings was also limited in its mitigation, added the judge, as it had equally affected the victims and the “stress, worry and uncertainty” they faced.
Having disqualified Sanders from being a company director for 10 years, the judge said, however, that a serious crime prevention order was not needed.