The Serious Fraud Office has secured nearly half a million pounds from a convicted scammer – almost 20 years after the original confiscation order was made.

Former financial adviser Alan Edwin Gardner, 57, was convicted at Worcester Crown court in  2009 of six counts of obtaining money by deception and four counts of false accounting. He was sentenced to six years imprisonment for each of the deception charges and three years for each of the false accounting charges to be served concurrently and disqualified from acting as a company director.

Gardner was found to have conned Britons living in Indonesia through a fictious scheme. While investors thought their money was growingin a Swiss bank, their money was spent by Gardner on personal outgoings, including betting losses.

A confiscation order of £186,151.16 was made at Hereford Crown court in December 2009 and paid in full, including £26,683.85 in interest accrued through late repayment, in March 2016. Since then, SFT investigators discovered Gardner owned equity in two UK properties, luxury vehicles and a number of bank accounts.

A new confiscation order of £491,967;97 was granted at Hereford Justice Centre. The money will be returned to the public through HM Treasury.

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Paul Napper, head of the SFO's proceeds of crime and international assistance division, said: ‘A conviction is never the end of the road for the SFO, and our proceeds of crime team will always make sure crime never pays.'