The Sunday Times was praised by the judge at Leicester crown court for helping to expose the activities of Carl Obern, who targeted charities and public bodies.
Peter Sallis, the actor who plays the inventor Wallace in the animated films, thought he was narrating a feature for schoolchildren about making soap.
But Obern used the resulting CD-Rom in a series of frauds in which he claimed he could employ people with mental and physical disabilities to make the soap.
He received £77,000 in grants and loans and tried to obtain another £147,000. In one scam he attempted to persuade the Milk Development Council that he could convert whey, a by-product of milk, into cosmetic products.
Obern, 51, of Brampton, Cumbria, who told his victims he had qualified as a biochemist at Toronto University, was exposed in an article by Michael Bilton in The Sunday Times Magazine in July 2004.
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Bilton found a curriculum vitae Obern had given to a council in Leicestershire and soon discovered it was full of false claims. For instance, Obern had not trained as a scientist but had taken a four-year apprenticeship as a farrier, which qualified him to shoe horses.
Bilton’s research took him to the Caribbean where Obern had spent 10 months in prison awaiting trial for fraud in the British Virgin Islands and to North Carolina where he had conned other people with his soap schemes.
Bilton tipped off the police and wrote his magazine article, entitled Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The night before it appeared two detectives arrested Obern. Obern’s girlfriend, Margit Haurenherm, 49, was charged with four counts of deception, which she denied. The prosecution offered no evidence and she was acquitted.
Judge Michael Stokes told Obern: “You had already £77,000 from a variety of sources and had it not been for the article in The Sunday Times by Michael Bilton you would have been on course to obtain further sums.”