Achilleas Kallakis

Achilleas Michalis Kallakis (born Stefan Michalis Kollakis on 3 September 1968) is responsible for the UK's largest ever mortgage fraud, of over £760 million, and has been called "Britain's most successful serial confidence trickster". By making a slight change to his name, purporting to be related to an oil and property tycoon and using a corrupt lawyer, he was able to defraud banks into giving him mortgages on offices with inflated valuations. He and his accomplice Alexander Williams were successfully prosecuted by the UK's Serious Fraud Office in 2013. Kallakis and Williams succeeded in bypassing fraud and due diligence checks by the banks despite having a previous convictions for fraud in 1995 and warning being raised about their lawyer who escaped prosecution.

Early life and family Kollakis was born in Ealing, west London, on 3 September 1968, the son of Michael S Kollakis and Erinoula Angelinakis, who married in Glamorgan in 1967. His father was a port captain and once ran an unsuccessful nightclub in Liverpool. The family lived in Ealing. He is the nephew of shipping magnate Lou Kollakis. He attended the University of Buckingham where he met his future partner in crime Martin Lewis.

He owned 31 Brompton Square, bought in the mid-2000s for £28 million, and had the entire garden dug out to a depth of 30 feet to build a three-storey basement. The project was abandoned in 2008 after the Kallakis was jailed and the property went into receivership, remaining a building site for 9 years before being sold to the Issa brothers for £25m in 2017.

Kallakis lived a luxurious lifestyle, gambling in London's casinos and owning several cars, including a Bentley Azure, another Bentley, a Ferrari Scaglietti and a Mercedes.

The fraud began to be discovered in 2008 when a German bank did some background checks on Kallakis after Allied Irish Banks attempted to sell some of the loans it had made to him.

Personal life In 1995, Kollakis married Pamela A. Stachowsky in Ealing. They had four children together.