After Cieran Griffin is jailed for seven years for defrauding women he dated out of more than £300,000:  How the 'British Tinder Swindler' started stealing as an altar boy... and even cheated his own granny out of £70,000

The £100 shirt, salmon-pink with a designer logo on the pocket, is casually unbuttoned at the collar. A designer watch – a Rolex, perhaps – is visible under his left cuff.

His hair is neatly-styled, teeth – fixed in a broad smile – are gleaming white, and his skin is golden with the tan of a recent holiday.

From his profile on the business networking site LinkedIn, Myles McNamara looks like any other businessman. A handsome, well-groomed one at that.

Based in Alderley Edge, the leafy suburb of Cheshire favoured by millionaires and footballers, he lists his job title as ‘director’ and says he is self-employed.

This professional-looking profile remains on LinkedIn: a reminder of the confident, clean-cut persona McNamara presented to the world, one which duped four women – and, the Mail can reveal, as least 11 more – into giving him loans of four, five and six-figure sums which he never paid back.

Cieran Griffin, 37, used aliases and fake social media accounts to pass himself off as a barrister, a property developer and a high-flying businessman

Griffin was arrested last September and left one woman £250,530.81 out of pocket

The man in the picture was unmasked this week as Cieran Griffin (also known as Cieran McNamara and Myles McNamara), a serial romance conman, compared to the infamous ‘Tinder Swindler’, who was jailed for seven years for defrauding women he was dating out of more than £300,000.

Griffin, 37, used aliases and fake social media accounts to pass himself off as a barrister, a property developer and a high-flying businessman, pretending to live a lavish lifestyle – first-class travel, five-star hotels, wads of cash – when, in reality, he was unemployed, penniless and of no fixed address.

In an astonishingly brazen move, he even attempted to continue his scams from prison: one of his final victims, a 43-year-old woman not part of the recent court case, has revealed he wined and dined her while masquerading as a DJ named James McNamara, before writing a grovelling note from prison telling her ‘I have missed you’.

For the woman, who was left with a £1,000 bill for a luxury wellness club in London and described the fraudster as ‘Prince Charming’, it seems to have been a lucky escape.

An investigation by Cheshire Police, triggered when another of his previous girlfriends raised the alarm, resulted in Griffin being arrested last September, and thanks to the detailed testimony of his four most recent victims, he is now behind bars.

Three of the women he conned have restraining orders against him and, for fear of tarnishing their personal and professional reputations even further, all four have asked not to be identified so they can move on with their lives.

One, we can reveal, was left out of pocket to the tune of £250,530.81 – an eye-watering sum which shows the depths of his deceit.

These women’s lives have been destroyed, their bank accounts emptied and their self-confidence left in tatters as a result of Griffin’s actions – for which he pleaded guilty, but has shown not a speck of remorse.

As one of his victims told the Mail this week: ‘I don’t want to relive this. His face is everywhere now, so he won’t be able to hide.’

But another woman – who was in a relationship with Griffin on and off for six months, and was tricked into loaning him £3,200 – does want to speak out.

Danielle (not her real name), 40, a single mum-of-four from Birmingham, met Griffin – then calling himself Christian McNamara – on the dating site Bumble in September 2021.

Speaking exclusively to the Mail, she says the pair never met, but spoke several times a day online, on WhatsApp and via video call.

‘He was flirty and very sexual right from the start,’ she says. ‘I enjoyed the banter, it was a laugh – something to make me smile and feel good about myself.

‘I was never attracted to him physically – I liked his sense of humour. But he loved sending me pictures of himself. He was extremely arrogant; he referred to himself as the “Ice King”.’

Griffin stole £70,000 from his grandmother Kathleen O’Sullivan – he would steal her bank card and memorise the numbers to buy expensive goods and flights

Griffin told Danielle he was 41 and worked as a barrister for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which rang true because he knew the names of senior officials and claimed to work for various different barristers’ chambers, despite not appearing on their websites.

‘He made the story very believable,’ she insists. ‘He’d go to different places around London, where he claimed to live, taking photographs and dropping pins on Google Maps to fit the narrative of what he said he was doing.

‘He sent me a picture of himself outside the CPS building. I had no reason to doubt him at that stage.’

After losing touch for a few months, they matched again on Bumble in April 2022 – and Danielle says it was only a matter of weeks before Griffin first asked her for money.

‘Just before Easter he called and said he’d been mugged on a train and lost all his cards. He said he couldn’t get home.

‘He gave me his bank details and I transferred £100 without a second thought.

‘This was a man I was interested in, a potential boyfriend, and it appealed to my nature to help him out.’

But the requests for money kept on coming.

‘As it was the bank holiday, he said he couldn’t get his cards back, so he needed more to get him through the weekend,’ recalls Danielle.

‘Then it was his best friend’s wedding and he didn’t have enough cash to get there and back. Next it was a golf match with his boss and it would embarrass him if he couldn’t go.

‘He was clever. Whenever I’d question his story, he’d video call me and be really nice, getting me in a good mood. Within an hour, he’d ask for money again.

‘In that moment, I trusted him. I thought I was helping him out with a few bits and bobs – I wasn’t keeping tally because I believed he’d pay it all back.’

The next excuse Griffin gave Danielle was that he owed £15,000 in legal debts. He also claimed to be going through a painful divorce, leaving his bank account in the red. At one point, he said he was in such financial straits he was going to take his own life.

Over two months, between April and June 2022, Danielle made 37 transfers to Griffin’s account, totalling £3,200 – a figure which, looking back, she feels deeply ashamed of.

She says it left her, a working mother trying to support her children, ‘without a penny to my name’.

‘At one point, I didn’t eat for ten days. I made sure my children were fed, so I went without. We didn’t have enough to buy toilet paper. I couldn’t pay my bills.’

She asked several times a day for the money back, but Griffin prevaricated, ignored her calls and messages, and showed his nasty side, calling her ‘crazy’ and blaming her for ‘harassing’ him.

Eventually, after promising to meet her with the cash six times – at various locations near her Birmingham home – and failing to show up, Griffin ceased all contact.

As well as reporting him to West Midlands Police (who, to her frustration, didn’t follow up on her allegations, instead directing her to Action Fraud, the national reporting centre), she started doing her own detective work online.

‘I put a picture of the two of us on Bumble, explaining what he’d done, and asked other women to come forward if they’d had similar experiences,’ she explains.

‘Eight women got in touch. He’d used different names – to one he called himself “Myles O’Sullivan” – and claimed to do all sorts of different jobs: working for the BBC, being a pilot, even being in a band.

Griffin attempted to continue his scams from prison: one of his final victims, a 43-year-old woman, has revealed he wined and dined her while masquerading as a DJ named James McNamara, before writing a grovelling note from jail telling her ‘I have missed you’

In the note to the woman, Griffin says ‘it’s been a rollercoaster few days’

‘One of them had taken out a £4,500 loan for him and never got it back. It was heartbreaking.’

With so many different aliases and backstories to untangle, Danielle found herself asking the question: just who was this man and how was he able to get away with it for so long?

The answer was more sinister than she could have imagined.

Speaking exclusively to the Mail this week, Griffin’s uncle, Anthony Ostrowski, revealed that all the fraudster’s relatives ‘hate him with a passion’ for what he did, not only to these women, but to his own family two decades earlier.

Anthony, 70, a retired builder who lives in Margate, Kent, says he disowned his nephew after he stole £70,000 from his maternal grandmother aged just 16.

‘He fleeced my mum four or five times for significant amounts and lots of little amounts over time,’ Anthony says.

‘He would pinch her bank card and she’d never know it was gone. He used to memorise the numbers.

‘He was stealing from her to buy things and see places. He’d use it to buy flights.

‘He liked all the gear and bought Burberry coats and things like that. He always liked to look smart.’

It’s a habit that seems to have stuck. When police arrested Griffin last year, they recovered £19,500 worth of brand-new clothing and sports accessories, including a £1,900 Burberry coat, a £400 Burberry scarf, Dubarry boots, Gucci trainers and a Ping golf set.

But his criminal behaviour can be traced back even further.

An only child, Griffin was born in Coventry, where his half-Polish mother, Christine Ostrowski, worked all hours in a factory and as a cleaner to raise him alone.

His birth name is, in fact, Cieran Daniel Ostrowski: Griffin was his grandmother’s maiden name.

Relatives aren’t clear about his father’s identity: he is thought to have been Limerick-born painter and decorator Henry ‘Harry’ McNamara (which explains his use of the surname) who separated from Christine, had no contact with his son and recently died of a heart condition aged 79.

A James McNamara, presumably a relative of Harry’s and once registered at the same Coventry address as Griffin, was convicted of carrying out £1,400 worth of cheque fraud in 2018. The apple, it seems, didn’t fall far from the tree.

Christine had mental health problems and struggled to look after her son – so, aged around six, he moved a short distance away to live with his grandmother, Kathleen O’Sullivan (another familiar surname) and her long-term boyfriend, Maurice.

‘My mum [Kathleen] doted on him and spoilt him absolutely rotten and… he took advantage of it,’ says Anthony.

Anthony’s mother told him Griffin was autistic, and he attended a school for children with special needs until he was 11.

There, he was something of a loner, bullied and constantly getting into trouble. The whole family – his ten aunts and uncles – chipped in to try to make his life better.

‘He was a quiet lad and very tall for his age,’ says Anthony. ‘I bought him trainers, phones and clothes when he was about nine or ten because I used to feel sorry for him.’

Griffin was an altar boy at Corpus Christi Catholic church in Binley, Coventry – and it was here that he was first caught stealing.

Kathleen was ‘horrified’ when the priest broke the news that her grandson, then 14, had been helping himself to the contents of the collection box.

His furious family marched him to the local police station, where he was briefly put in a cell to teach him a lesson. He cried his eyes out. But no lesson was learned.

A few years later, he was back at the police station – and this time it went to court, where Kathleen gave evidence against Griffin for stealing the £70,000. He was sentenced to 18 months behind bars.

‘She phoned me after and said, “He’s gone to prison, the little toerag,”’ Anthony recalls.

‘That’s why none of the family want anything to do with the boy.

‘After the way her treated her, my mum was devastated. She was like that until she died in 2002.’

Griffin’s family forbade him from attending her funeral. He cut all ties with them, except his mother, who seemed blind to his misdeeds and even let him stay at her terraced home in Rugby.

But he abused her trust, setting up a credit account with builders’ merchant Jewsons in 2015 and running up a bill of over £7,000, giving his mother’s house as his ‘company’ address.

When investigators turned up at her door, Christine realised she’d been had.

She died later that year of a heart attack. Griffin was, once again, banned by his family from going to the funeral.

His aunt, Yadzia Daynes, 71, said this week of her sister: ‘Christine had her hardships but always stayed by her son.

‘She was such a gentle soul. Cieran definitely caused her distress. He’s always been trouble.’

In the following years, an unrepentant Griffin ramped up his romance fraud, which spanned several counties – London, Cheshire, Warwickshire and Hertfordshire – and women of all ages and backgrounds.

In 2014, he was sentenced for 15 months for defrauding a woman he met on a dating website.

In 2017, he got two years, five months for conning a girlfriend – who believed he was a barrister, and at whose home he spent most nights of the week – out of £3,700.

After asking for loans and deposits for a (non-existent) romantic holiday to Cyprus, he fell back on a technique he’d used all those years before: memorising her bank details and using her card to pay for lavish meals, designer goods and travel.

The judge at Warwick Crown Court said at the time: ‘This sentence must have a deterrent effect, because you must be deterred from acting in this way again towards women with whom you form a relationship.’

A mere four years later, he was at it again. Danielle suspects he never stopped.

Mercifully, via her bank’s fraud department, she managed to get all her money back. It’s not known if the four women who took Griffin to court ever did.

Now, facing a lengthy stretch in HMP Altcourse, a Category B men’s prison in Liverpool, she says the fraudster is ‘where he deserves to be’.

‘It’s a long way from the high life he was living with my money,’ she adds.

‘I just hope other women out there listen to my story, so it doesn’t happen to them.

‘And take a long, hard look at his face – because, mark my words, he’ll never change.’

Additional reporting by Stephanie Condron and Andy Dolan