Airport conman Andrew Gradon on the run

Feb 7 2010 by Coreena Ford, Sunday Sun

A CRAFTY conman is on the run after scamming his way across Europe for more than eight years.

Trickster Andrew Gradon, of County Durham, has been conning scores of flight passengers out of cash since 2002 and investigators believe he could be making as much as £15,000 a month – almost as much Prime Minister Gordon Brown – through his brazen hustle.

Despite totting up scores of victims at airports in 12 countries, no one has a photo of Gradon, who was born in Marske, Redcar, and no one knows where he is at the moment.

His one-man crimewave is explored by Chris Jackson and the BBC Inside Out team, who went in search of the Scarlet Pimpernel and discovered a trail stretching right across Europe.

Gradon targets businessmen and women carrying briefcases in airports, telling them he’s just missed his flight.

He then asks fellow passengers for money to help get him the next flight back to Newcastle.

He promises each person he’ll be able to pay once he gets home, yet he never does . . . and when his kind-hearted victims try the email address or a mobile telephone number he has handed them, messages bounce back and the telephone line rings unobtainable.

Chris Jackson and the Inside Out team journey to Nice on the French Riviera, where Gradon is believed to have been recently targeting plane passengers.

He meets journalist Mike Meade, who runs a blog on the Riviera Reporter website, and ran a story about the so-called airport scam, and soon after he was contacted by people from all over Europe – in 12 different countries – saying they had fallen for his trick.

One victim, Richard Wilson said: “I was at Nice airport to catch a flight to London and some guy came up to me.