Melanie was residing the excessive life in a Spanish villa… till she discovered her ex-husband paid for it by fleecing aged victims out of £11m

For years, Melanie Long enjoyed the high life, jet-setting on sun-kissed holidays to the likes of Mexico and Florida with her husband Steven, who was a personal wealth adviser.

And when he bought her a beautiful villa in the seaside town of Javea, in Spain in 2015, as a parting gift to mark their split, she accepted.

But what Melanie, 56, didn’t know was that her glamorous lifestyle was being funded by money her husband and his business partner Raymond Simpson had swindled from hundreds of pensioners.

In March, Steven Long, 59, admitted two counts of fraud, and Simpson, 78, was last week convicted in his absence of two counts of fraud following a four-week trial at Southwark Crown Court in London.

Simpson is now thought to be hiding out in a Portuguese bolthole, claiming to be too ill to travel to face justice.

The crooked pair defrauded savers out of £11 million between 2008 and 2018, using the proceeds to buy villas in Spain and Portugal and rent out five-bedroom mansions.

They convinced victims to invest their life savings in schemes to protect against care fees and inheritance tax, but instead they ploughed the money into dodgy overseas investments.

One text sent by Simpson to Long, and seen by the police, showed that the venture was driven by pure greed. ‘I am sick of being poor,’ he wrote.

However, it seems their loved ones knew nothing of their nefarious plans. Melanie, who met Long after his first marriage collapsed in 2004, says she is filled with regret.

Speaking to The Mail on Sunday, she broke down, saying she had no idea where the money was coming from. ‘I don’t have anything to say about Mr Long,’ Melanie said in a brief telephone call. ‘I cannot bear to think about that time any more. I had a breakdown after it.’

Long’s marital circumstances during the decade-long fraud were also far from clear.

During his marriage to Melanie he had an affair with a girlfriend, whom the MoS is choosing not to name, and in October 2015 Long bought Melanie the Jaeva villa for £500,000 after she decided to live abroad full-time without him.

Asked what became of her villa, Melanie added: ‘That was all given back, as soon as I found out where the money had come from. I looked after the villa as much as I could. 

‘But I didn’t know where the money came from. The minute I did, I gave the money back.’

The deception was uncovered after Long’s company, Universal Wealth Management, went bust in 2018 and police launched an investigation. 

Eight years on, and following the collapse of their marriage, his former wife is filled with regret. 

As one of Long’s friends put it: ‘It was a soap opera. Something you see in the movies.’

It is easy to see how Melanie was swept up by his charm. Those who fell prey say he was a phenomenal salesman – personable, witty and seemingly empathetic, paying house visits to clients after their loved ones died on the pretence of concern, for example.

As one of his victims, Deborah Wildish, from Paddock Wood in Kent, puts it: ‘He used our vulnerability against us. He knew everything about my family and still he deceived us.’

As with other victims, her losses have never been returned.

Deborah met Long at a seminar hosted at The Cavendish Hotel in Eastbourne in 2012 after receiving a leaflet through her front door.

In stark contrast to Long, who was racking up bills of more than £120,000 on hotels in Mexico’s Mayan resorts at the time, Deborah, 65, was facing one of the most challenging moments of her life.

Sitting next to her husband of 21 years, David, 81, Deborah still cannot bring herself to mention Long’s name.

A year before the leaflet came through Deborah’s door, her parents, Albert and Patricia Lark, both suffered serious health complications. 

Albert had a stroke and Patricia had dementia, so Deborah, who was working full-time as a teaching assistant, spent her weekends caring for them at their home in Hailsham, East Sussex.

Trying to prepare for any unexpected costs, Deborah opened a trust with Long and placed her parent’s property in it, with her sister’s backing.

Deborah did so in the hope she could protect her parents’ home from inheritance tax or care home fees if she could no longer look after them.

Long assured her personally that he would take care of her property in the trust.

But after both her parents died shortly afterwards – her mother aged 82 in May 2015 and her father aged 85 in February 2016 – she decided to sell the property to provide for her children and help her sister set up a new life in Portugal.

Shortly after her father’s death, Long paid Deborah a house visit and promised he would handle any paperwork quickly to help with the sale.

The house sold for roughly £320,000 in April 2017 and the money should have immediately been transferred into the trust and then into Deborah’s personal bank account. She would then send a share to her sister.

But the lump sum never arrived. Instead, Long periodically drip-fed £25,000 into her account over the following months. Despite frequent phone calls and emails and promises from Long, £84,000 remains missing to this day.

Deborah says: ‘The memory of even just the amount of money I lost is too much.

‘I can be watching a television quiz show and if the prize is £80,000, I just can’t deal with it and have to turn the TV off.

‘He [Long] knew my mum and dad were ill, and about the stroke and dementia. He knew we were vulnerable.’

Long repeated this same pattern of deceit over and over again to fund his lifestyle.

By 2017, Long was in a dire strait. He had used trust funds like Deborah’s to fund Melanie’s villa. He had also put a £3 million bid on the grade II-listed Coton House in Rugby, equipped with its own

tennis court, all while renting two mansions – one of which was owned by Kieron Dyer, a former Premier League footballer.

And when he wasn’t living it up at home he was on five-star breaks in Mexico, where it is rumoured he held property.

His partner Simpson, on the other hand, seems to have been more discreet. He purchased land in Spain, using £600,000 of victims’ money on the pretence of building two villas each worth £3 million.

The development fell through and he now lives in a three-bedroom villa with a pool called ‘Casa Simpson’ in Mirando do Corvo, Portugal, 90 minutes from Porto. When the MoS tracked him down to the villa, his two gardeners said he was unable to come to the front door because he was ‘very unwell’.

Before Simpson’s jury trial commenced, Judge Gregory Perrins ruled it could be heard in his absence after concluding that the defendant was not telling the truth about his health.

He said that Simpson was ‘hiding behind’ a recent minor hip operation and did not have credible evidence to back up his assertion that he could not travel.

Simpson’s trial concluded last week when the jury returned two guilty verdicts for fraud, and the pair now face years in prison for their dishonesty.

But for another of their victims, Paul Matthews, 67, the fight for justice will go on until all the money is returned.

Paul’s adoptive father Donald set up a trust with Long in 2008. It consisted of the home he shared with his wife Olive in Bury St Edmunds, West Suffolk, which was worth just over £250,000.

After Donald died aged 89 in December 2016 from pulmonary thrombosis, and Olive died in June 2017, also aged 89, from spine cancer and a brain tumour, Paul decided to sell the house.

As in Deborah’s case, the £258,000 from the sale should have immediately gone into Paul’s account so he could share it with his 65-year-old brother Derek, who lives in New Zealand. Paul planned to use the money to move to Spain because – in a strange twist of fate – his birth mother Betty Smith, who offered him up for adoption when she was 17, lived in Javea, the same coastal town where Melanie Long had her villa.

He said: ‘I waited a few months after the sale went through because I thought the transfer might take time, but I never heard anything back from Long about the money.

‘All of it has gone. I feel like I can’t trust anyone now.

‘My dad was a very private and proud man, who served in the Second World War, but he did trust people. He would have trusted Long, and it wouldn’t have come into his head that someone would act in this way.

‘After meeting my birth mum and getting to know her, I wanted to be able to spend more time with her in Spain. All that is gone now, all because of Long and his greed.

‘The only saving grace is my mum and dad didn’t know all the money had gone.

‘Before she died, my mum told me, ‘At least I know you will be all right with the house.’

‘I am glad she didn’t live to see what has happened. I don’t know if I will ever see any of the money back but I have told my children to carry on the fight if I die.’

The reality is many of Long and Simpson’s victims may never see any of their money back because tracing assets is notoriously difficult, as illustrated by the fact it has taken eight years since the pair’s business went bust for them to face justice.

When Long was convicted in March, lead investigator DC Lisa Hunt said: ‘He targeted victims who placed their full trust in him – many of them elderly, vulnerable, or planning carefully for their families’ futures.

‘Long callously exploited that trust for his own gain, leaving victims and their loved ones facing devastating financial and emotional consequences. Some lost the security they had spent a lifetime building, with money set aside for retirement or essential care simply wiped out.’

When they are sentenced next month, the pair face years behind bars and the possibility of their jail sentences being extended if they do not hand over their remaining assets.

For Simpson, who is now 78, this means he may die in prison if he can be brought back from Portugal. But for Long, 59, he faces the rest of his life being hounded for the money which he defrauded.

According to those who know him best, there is very little left of the money. A friend added: ‘A lot of these characters in the films, they have a pot of gold dug somewhere and they go and dig it up when they need it.

‘He has literally got nothing. In his head he will be thinking, ‘I have lost all this money, but it is in the past and it will be fine.’ But the families of his victims are not going to accept that.’