Victims reveal how travel agent faked cancer and stole millions
Deceit beyond belief: Devastated victims reveal how travel agent – who fleeced her own mother out of £500,000 – faked her terminal cancer diagnosis and stole millions from friends and clients in holiday scam
- Lyne Barlow, 39, stole £500k from her mother and stole millions in holiday scam
- Victims Shelley and Evan McAlpine lost £3k booking trip with terminally ill son
Shelley and Evan McAlpine were at their lowest ebb when, in February 2020, they decided to book a week’s holiday they believed might be their last as a family of five.
At the time, the couple were reeling from the most devastating news imaginable, having learned that their middle son, who had been born with a life-limiting disability, had only months to live.
‘He’d just come out of intensive care, where we’d already nearly lost him,’ says Shelley, a 40-year-old mother-of-three from County Durham. ‘We’d been told he didn’t have long, so we decided we wanted to make some memories for him and our other children. That’s when I picked up the phone.’
On the other end of the line was local travel agent Lyne Barlow, who came highly recommended by a friend who had used her to book trips all over the world.
Shelley and Evan’s requirements were more modest: restricted by their son’s genetic condition, they wanted to book a week at Center Parcs. ‘Lyne was wonderful and so sympathetic, and said she would take care of all the logistics,’ Shelley says. ‘She told me she would take all the stress away — all we had to do was pay and turn up.’
Con: The police mugshot of Lyne Barlow, 39, who faked cancer (right)
Victims: Paul and Elizabeth Stocks got stranded in Turkey
Instead, Barlow took £3,000 of the McAlpines’ hard-earned savings, before disappearing off the face of the earth.
Only after several weeks did the family learn the despicable truth. Lyne Barlow was a con artist, one who had used a bogus travel agency to fund her own lavish lifestyle.
READ MORE: The shameless emails that show how crooked travel agent, 39, duped victims into believing she had cancer in £2.6m scam
Over the course of just a year, she left more than 1,400 customers out of pocket in a scam totalling around £2.6 million.
Earlier this month, the Mail revealed that Barlow, 39, had been jailed for nine years following a court case which unravelled the full extent of her fraudulent activities.
Durham Crown Court heard that, alongside her ‘customers’, she had swindled her own mother out of £500,000 — at one point leaving her on the verge of losing her home. She also lied about having terminal bone cancer in order to deflect from her duplicity.
Her cynical exploitation led Judge Joanne Kidd to brand her a ‘thoroughly callous individual’ — a sentiment echoed by the victims the Mail spoke to, as we uncovered the extraordinary tale of how a suburban mother-of-two became a multi-million pound fraudster.
On paper, certainly, Lyne Barlow seemed an unlikely criminal mastermind. She was born and raised in a middle-class area of Durham, alongside her sister, Lesley, and married her accountant husband, Paul, in her early 20s.
She had previously worked as a travel agent, and she and her husband and their two children lived in a modest semi-detached in Stanley, County Durham.
So far so ordinary — until 2015, when, as Durham police Detective Sergeant Alan Meehan reveals, Lyne’s father, Barry, died suddenly at the age of 58, leaving her mother, Susan, in receipt of a number of insurance payouts.
‘Over a period of time, Lyne had positioned herself so that she had control over her mother’s finances,’ he says. ‘She was taking regular holidays abroad; she was having lavish parties, which equated to roughly £600,000.’
Barlow’s manipulation of her mother’s finances also extended to her withholding Susan’s mail, although she did receive one letter telling her that her mortgage was in arrears. When Susan broached the subject with her daughter, she told her it was a clerical error, before then faking a letter from the bank confirming her mother had a ‘nil balance’. ‘In fact, she was in real danger of having her house repossessed,’ DS Meehan reveals.
Barlow’s astonishing duplicity did not stop there: with her mother’s money fast running out, Lyne came up with another ruse.
‘She introduced the possibility of people investing in her husband’s business and getting shares, which would produce dividends,’ says DS Meehan. ‘The company didn’t have that opportunity, it never existed.’
Nonetheless, she persuaded a neighbour to give her £24,000, while a friend handed over £100,000.
When those funds started to run low, Barlow realised she had a problem: everyone was starting to ask for returns on their investment.
‘That’s when she started with the holiday fraud, trying to get cash liquidity,’ says DS Meehan.
Lyne Barlow Independent Travel was registered with Companies House in November 2019, and quickly gained a reputation as a helpful local service that had access to phenomenal bargains, often advertised via a group she had set up on Facebook.
‘My supervisor at work told me he’d booked a holiday to Dubai with Lyne and got a fantastic deal,’ recalls Daniel Hill, a 40-year-old Nissan employee from Sunderland. ‘He paid £1,000 for him and his partner for one week, including flights and hotels, which sounded amazing.’
Barlow had also come highly recommended to Shelley. ‘One of my friends had travelled the world with Lyne,’ she says. ‘She had been to Dubai and the Caribbean on brilliant deals, and had just booked to go to Florida. She couldn’t speak highly enough about her.’
In fact, the police believe that Barlow was initially subsidising these apparently bargain breaks from the money she had stolen from friends, before then using subsequent deposits paid by new incoming customers to pay for other successful holidays — in effect, a Ponzi scheme.
Of course, Barlow’s customers were oblivious to the scam. ‘I was a bit sceptical at first,’ Daniel recalls. ‘Then I did a bit of digging. She came up on Companies House and she seemed legitimate.’
Reassured, in December 2019, he booked a £1,000 package to Dubai for a week the following March with his train guard wife, Amy, also 40.
‘I paid in full, then got an email confirmation with a business heading and an ATOL number,’ he says.
Wowed by the deal, he also recommended it to his parents and in-laws, who booked it, too. ‘So Lyne now had £3,000 from us,’ he says.
Lyne Barlow claimed to her customers that she was covered by insurance and was a member of the trusted travel brand Association of British Travel Agents. (Pictured left: Lyne Barlow)
Travel agent Lyne Barlow (left) arrives at Durham Crown Court to be sentenced for defrauding friends, family and hundreds of customers who bought holidays from her in a £2.6 million con
Three months later, it was Shelley’s turn to entrust her holiday plans to Barlow. In February 2020, her middle son — then aged six and who she has asked us not to name — had emerged from intensive care, and doctors had told the family that he did not have long to live.
‘We were devastated and just wanted to make his last weeks the happiest we could,’ she says. Center Parcs was an obvious choice, as it involved no complex travel and had specially adapted lodges for those with particular needs.
‘I asked Lyne if she could take on the arrangements for a week’s holiday as my head was spinning,’ Shelley recalls. ‘She called back and said she had managed to get an incredible deal: instead of £2,500 for one week, she could get us a fortnight for £3,000.
‘I was a bit sceptical, but she was incredibly empathetic, and convinced me it was the right thing to do — obviously, she played on my vulnerability, and I didn’t question her credibility because of my friend’s recommendation.’
Shelley paid in full for the trip — due to take place later that month — and when, a week later, she had still not received a receipt she chased it up.
‘Lyne replied saying, ‘My mistake, I’ll get it to you straight away,’ but then another week went by, so I messaged her again,’ Shelley recalls.
This time, she received a receipt attached to an email. The document containing just Shelley’s name, the Centre Parcs logo and the amount she had paid.
‘It didn’t have any of her company details on it, no registered address — anyone could have typed it. I emailed back, saying that I didn’t mean to be rude, but it didn’t look like an official booking. Then, when I asked for further confirmation, she stopped replying to any of my messages,’ says Shelley.
‘I contacted my friend and asked if all was OK with her upcoming trip to Florida, and learned that Lyne wasn’t returning her calls either. Then, a few days later, she called me and told me Lyne been arrested for fraud.’
A devastated Shelley burst into tears. ‘It wasn’t the holiday, but the fact that she knew my world had fallen apart, and she still felt able to do this to me,’ she says. ‘The children had their bags packed and I had to explain they couldn’t go. They were devastated.’
A few miles away, Daniel Hill was one of the hundreds digesting the news that he had been scammed, too. His March 2020 holiday to Dubai had been postponed due to Covid, but when, later the same year, it became clear that travel restrictions might remain for several months, he asked for his money back. ‘I contacted Lyne, who said she could get the money back, but that she’d got cancer and was receiving treatment, so it might take longer,’ he recalls.
It was a story Barlow was sharing with many of her customers in a desperate bid to buy more time. ‘It’s stage 3/4 in my bones and need to have chemo put into my spine to stop it from getting to my brain,’ she wrote to one who inquired whether her holiday was still going ahead. She also deceived family members, asking for lifts to fake hospital appointments, as well as cutting her hair and leaving it on her pillow to suggest it had fallen out due to chemotherapy.
Daniel was among those to feel sorry for her. ‘I didn’t pressure her too much,’ he says. ‘But after a few weeks, I emailed her and she said she’d been in hospital, which is why she hadn’t replied.
‘At that point, I started doing some investigating and saw a number of Facebook posts asking about her. The sheer number of people made me realise I’d been scammed — and that my parents and in-laws had, too.’
Even those who did make it abroad were conned, with many left stranded after discovering their return flights didn’t exist — or that their hotel booking was not quite what it seemed. Among them was Paul Stocks, 42, who runs a lawn maintenance business from his home in Chester-Le-Street.
He had booked a five-star, all-inclusive golfing holiday to Turkey for his wife, Elizabeth, and two other couples for £7,000, not long before Lyne was arrested.
‘We all had some time off at the start of September 2020, and so we arranged something last-minute,’ he recalls. ‘We booked on Monday to depart on the Friday.’
The holiday got off to a rocky start when the couples received an email telling them their flight had been moved back a day — and was now departing from Manchester instead of Newcastle.
‘One of my friends went to see Lyne at home. She was wearing a cancer bandana and said she had had treatment that morning,’ Paul recalls. ‘She apologised profusely and said she would get us into the business lounge.’
Apparently, as good as her word, the couples arrived at Manchester airport to find they were indeed booked into the lounge, while the luxury resort near Antalya they had booked was every bit as magnificent as billed.
That is, until day four, when the party was summoned to the hotel manager’s office and told that, while they were booked in for 14 nights, Barlow had only paid for three. In order to stay for the duration, they needed to pay an extra £2,800 per couple.
‘We didn’t have that kind of money,’ Paul recalls. After frantic phone calls to establish what was going on, by 8pm that night they found themselves effectively homeless. ‘We were miles from home and literally didn’t know what to do, as a lot of places were closed due to Covid,’ says Paul.
They were saved by a kind-hearted expat who offered them an apartment until they could get home six days later on the cheapest flight they could find. ‘Lyne told us she would email our return boarding passes, but that didn’t happen,’ says Paul.
By then the party knew Barlow had been arrested. She arrived at Durham police station for questioning wearing a headscarf and walking with a crutch, still trying to maintain she had cancer.
Her façade soon buckled and she wept as, under police questioning, she claimed she could not sleep because of her guilt at what she had put people through. ‘I have to suffer for what I’ve done to people,’ she sobbed.
Her tears proved to be little in the way of mitigation for Judge Kidd who, jailing her for nine years, told her she had ‘an extraordinary talent for dishonesty’. She added: ‘The extent of the betrayal of your mother is truly breathtaking.’
DC Ali Blackett, who worked on the case, says Lyne’s mother, Susan, remains devastated at her daughter’s betrayal. Other victims, meanwhile, are still struggling to understand Barlow’s callous disregard for their circumstances.
‘Despicable’ is the word Shelley uses today. Her son has defied expectations by surviving thus far, but the family know that time is running out.
‘To exploit someone at a time like that, it’s the lowest of the low,’ says Shelley, adding that she doubts Barlow is truly sorry. DC Ali Blackett agrees: ‘She said she was remorseful — but she is a fraudster and fraudsters lie.’
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