A Swansea man who stole more than £200,000 from his own family, including his widowed grandfather’s entire life savings, has been jailed after spending nearly a year on the run in Turkey.
Terrence O’Connor, 33, of Carmel Road, Winch Wen, secretly set up online and phone banking on the accounts of his parents, siblings and grandfather, then helped himself to their money for more than five years.
Sentencing him at Swansea Crown Court, Judge Huw Rees called him a “thoroughly dishonest individual” and told him: “Your behaviour was unforgivable.”
The thefts came to light in May 2020, prosecutor Dean Pulling told the court, when O’Connor’s grandfather walked into his bank in Swansea city centre to withdraw cash and found almost all of his £80,000 in savings and pension payments gone.
The bank’s investigation traced the money into O’Connor’s parents’ accounts and out again through transfers and online purchases, transactions the parents knew nothing about.
When his parents confronted him at his partner’s address in Llansamlet, there was a physical altercation, and his father came away with his son’s phone, which he handed to the police.
Arrested in August 2021, O’Connor denied everything and refused to hand over his PINs and passwords, forcing what the court heard was a lengthy investigation through banking records and phone data, which turned up bank call recordings of O’Connor posing as his own relatives to move their money.
He kept his grandfather in the dark by intercepting the bank’s letters during his regular visits to the pensioner’s home in St Thomas, and hid his tracks by shuffling money between the family’s accounts.
When officers came to arrest him in May last year, his car was outside but the door went unanswered. Four days later he took a ferry from Dover to France and travelled on to Turkey, where he lived for almost a year before flying home in April and being arrested at Gatwick Airport.
In all he took £79,659 from his grandfather, £84,094 from his parents, £29,353 from his brother and £8,241 from his sister. His grandfather’s bank repaid the stolen money in full and his brother’s bank repaid half, but the rest of the family lost everything. His grandfather has since died.
In a statement read to the court, O’Connor’s father said the thefts were not a one-off but “a conscious choice he made day after day for more than five years”, adding: “For what he did to my father and the rest of us, I can never forgive him. We are an honest, hard-working family.”
Of a prison letter of apology his son sent his mother, the father said: “I do believe he was sorry, but not for us. He is sorry he is in prison. He wasn’t sorry when he was stealing from us every day for five years.” He asked the court to “teach him a lesson that he cannot just do what he wants to”.
O’Connor admitted fraud by false representation and possession of criminal property, and has previous convictions for burglary, going equipped for theft and handling stolen goods. His barrister Hywel Davies said the guilty pleas were his “best and only mitigation” for offending that was “extreme, targeted, and cruel”.
His former partner Chelsea Myles, 26, of Tegfan, Trallwn, Llansamlet, admitted possession of criminal property after allowing £42,233 of the stolen money through her account between 2017 and 2020, when she was as young as 17. Her barrister Emily Bennett said “naivety” played its part.
Judge Rees said Myles had been “under the spell” of her “deeply dishonest” partner, and handed her 12 months suspended for 18, with a rehabilitation course and 180 hours of unpaid work.
O’Connor was jailed for five years and three months, with a quarter off for his guilty pleas, and will serve 40 per cent in custody. The judge said that given O’Connor’s refusal to cooperate, the police investigation was to be commended.
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