A former TV soap actor who went on the run before his trial for a \u00a313.6m modelling fraud has been jailed for nine years. <\/p>\n
Philip Foster, 51, who played Christian Wright in the Liverpool soap Brookside, was jailed in his absence for eight and a half years in February 2025 for fraud and money laundering, after conning thousands of would-be models.<\/p>\n
He hid in Spain but was arrested in Alicante in September and subsequently extradited to the UK. He was given an extra six-month sentence for absconding.<\/p>\n
At Sheffield Crown Court, Judge David Dixon told him: “You were a coward, you decided to hide and didn’t come and face the music.”<\/p>\n
Foster ran a network of fake modelling agencies and photographic studios for more than eight years, targeting aspiring models and their parents.<\/p>\n
The judge said his co-defendants had come to court to be sentenced. <\/p>\n
He referred to Foster buying designer watches and a Porsche for his daughter, as well as being photographed on yachts.<\/p>\n
This showed Foster was “living a lifestyle based on the income from this illegal scheme”, he said.<\/p>\n
The court heard about the deaths of Foster’s wife and son.<\/p>\n
His barrister, Anthony Barraclough, said Foster’s wife had died from cancer and his son Michael had been murdered around Christmas 2025.<\/p>\n
Barraclough told the court: “He has had a great deal going on, of a terrible nature, but he is nevertheless an absconder.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A former TV soap actor who went on the run before his trial for a \u00a313.6m modelling fraud…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":804760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-804759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=804759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/804760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=804759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=804759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=804759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}