Aged just 38, he had already been a cruise ship captain, airline pilot, police officer, a boss at Jaguar Land Rover and a multi-millionaire tycoon.

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A pal of Boris Johnson and a devoted family man with a £30million trust fund, Oliver was renovating a £10million house in Notting Hill.

He was also buying a holiday home on millionaire’s row in chic Sandbanks, Dorset, along with a £380,000 custom-designed Rolls-Royce.

The man, who also claimed he spoke fluent Swedish, was a force of nature.

While doing all these amazing jobs and projects, he had even managed to beat cancer.

But it was all a lie.

Highly successful tycoon Jon Oliver is really unemployed Jody Francis Oliver, a penniless dad of three from Hereford.

His current home is prison where he is serving six years for fraud and theft.

Using seven different identities he pulled off scams worth around £4.5million, pocketing £1.2million for himself.

Not only did he have a wife and children but Oliver also had male fiancés and two boyfriends, who he duped, as well as dozens of unsuspecting friends.

He even lied about his age — he is actually 45.

The judge who jailed Oliver described him as “a despicable fraudster” and said the time had come “to end this charade”.

Oliver’s tale of audacious deception is being told in The Times’ new podcast, Stories Of Our Times, starting today, and here we take a look at his seven fake identities:

1. MOTOR TYCOON

The story begins in the Welsh border town of Knighton where Jody Oliver, the sun of a double glazing worker, was a small-time car salesman and part-time special constable.

Around 2002, aged 25, he married childhood sweetheart and teacher Laura Harris, before setting up Advance Driving School, an off-road experience company.

Now calling himself Johan Oliver, he told champion rally driver Colin McRae that he had got him a £3million sponsorship deal with Coca-Cola. He also bragged that his friendship with the chief executive of Ryanair had won £350,000 of sponsorship for promising young driver Kris Meeke. Both deals were fake.

Johan claimed to be drinking buddies with Boris Johnson and on his desk he kept a framed invitation to Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. It was forged.

2. POLICE OFFICER

During his time in the Dyfed-Powys force, Oliver won a police award after sending a fake letter from an inspector to the Chief Constable praising his excellent performance. He eventually lost his job.

Oliver started spending weekends away from his family, saying he was the co-owner of a funeral directorship and was needed on weekend “death duty”. The company had never heard of him.

He was in fact 20 miles away, in Tredegar, South Wales, telling locals he was a police officer called Jonathan Kane.

The conman was in fact escaping mounting debts at home that he had run up in several failed slot machine and pool table businesses.

He told creditors his father owned a casino in Monaco and that he had donated £1million to the Tory Party.

3. JAGUAR LAND ROVER BOSS

Now 34, Oliver moved to Newport, South Wales, and called himself Jonathan Flynn Oliver.

 He met Rhys Burgess, then 19, on a gay dating app. He told Rhys he was 28, childless and “director of events” at Jaguar Land Rover.

Oliver put up photos of his own children at their home, telling his male lover they were his sister’s kids.

 They were engaged in 2013, sending invitations to their Caribbean wedding. Anthony Brookes, who bought one of Oliver’s debt-ridden slot machine firms, said: “If you met Jody, you wouldn’t wish to meet a nicer man. But working with him turned out to be one of the worst experiences of my life.”

4. CRUISE SHIP CAPTAIN

By 2018 Oliver had lost more than £130,000 gambling online and was taking out high-interest payday loans to try to settle the debts.

 He told lover Rhys, he had been headhunted to be a captain for Carnival Cruises, part of P&O, and began calling himself Jonathan Flynn Oliver, master mariner.

 But wearing a uniform and P&O lanyard, Captain Oliver took payments for “discounted” cruise tickets from Rhys’s mother, grandmother and friends. He produced fake letters, documents and payslips from Carnival, as well as setting up fictitious email accounts to provide details of excursions, ships and flights.

But on December 30, 2018, the duped cruise passengers waited outside their home for transfers that never arrived. They called in the police, who reckoned Oliver made nearly £320,500 from the scam.

Oliver claimed to detectives that he had been diagnosed with a brain tumour which affected his memory. In a later interview, he said he was suffering a mental breakdown.

His wife Laura, who had learned of his double life with Rhys via photos on social media, revealed her husband got seasick every time he went on water and had never even been on a cruise as a passenger, let alone as captain. They separated.

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5. SWEDISH SPEAKER

Within days of being interviewed by police, Oliver moved to Worcester, where he got a sales job at a Volvo car dealership by claiming he had worked at the company’s headquarters in Sweden for 20 years.

Calling himself Joey, he often spoke on the phone in Swedish but a suspicious colleague recorded a conversation, ran it through Google translate and discovered Oliver was speaking gibberish.

Oliver would take numerous days off for bereavements, when in reality he was being quizzed by police about the cruise ship scam.

Out on bail, he moved to Bedford in 2020 and became supercar dealer Joe Oliver. Claiming to have a personal relationship with “Mr Ford”, he became top salesman at Motorvogue but sold cars and pocketed the cash. Hotel owner and car fanatic Ciro Ciampi sent £15,000 to Oliver to secure three Italian Fiat Arbarth sports cars, which never appeared.

Ciro, 46, told the Stories Of Our Times podcast: “I’ve been in business for decades but he hook, line and sinkered me.”

By the time Ciro complained to Motorvogue “Joe” had been sacked.

 Police were on his trail again.

6. AIRLINE PILOT

Aged 43, in late 2020, he became Jon Oliver, a British Airways pilot, whose flights were still grounded because of Covid. BA said he never worked for them.

He met barber Liam Britten, then 27, on dating app Grindr. Oliver showered him with hundreds of pounds’ worth of gifts and proposed on Valentine’s Day 2021.

Oliver told Liam how his parents had disowned him after he came out and that his rich grandmother had taken pity on him and left him £30million in her will.

His real grandmother owned a haberdashery in his home town.

Running out of money, he told Liam’s relatives he could get them discount BA holidays and they are believed to have lost tens of thousands when he pocketed the cash. They also paid him £7,000 for four VIP tickets to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in July 2021, but were turned away on arrival.

7. PROPERTY TYCOON

With his fiancé Liam, Oliver moved to London, where he told wealthy people he had befriended that he was renovating his £10.5million house in Notting Hill. He even had fake Land Registry documents for the property. At HR Owen’s Mayfair car dealership he designed a 4×4 Rolls-Royce costing £380,000. Oliver and Liam were going to be married at the top of the Shard skyscraper.

But his new friends were becoming suspicious and invited Oliver to dinner at a posh West End restaurant, where they confronted him and called the police.

Oliver told officers he was BA pilot Jonathan and that Jody was his evil twin brother. He was released without arrest and fled to a caravan in Whitstable, Kent, with Liam, where they stayed for two months. By now Liam was also suspicious so Oliver showed him statements which appeared to prove he had £1,628,040 in the bank and a BA monthly salary of £9,544.

In fact he was worth just £351 when the courts later seized his assets. Oliver pretended to have cancer in his leg and spine, and the pair moved back to Bedford so Liam’s relatives could nurse him.

But one morning Oliver said he was popping out only to never return. He eventually gave himself up to police and appeared at court in Newport in August 2022 where he was jailed for six years for the cruise fraud. In May, Oliver pleaded guilty to 17 further charges of fraud and theft at Cardiff Crown Court. He will be in prison until 2026.

In an email to Liam, Oliver wrote: “I should have left and got help ages ago. I don’t even know who I am and I can’t live like this.”

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