'Remember me?' Women fleeced out of £600,000 by lover claiming to be illegitimate son of Edmund de Rothschild confronts conman

Christine Handy was left with debts of £600,000 and a baby after she met Mark Hatton, who had claimed he was Alex de Rothschild, a member of the famous banking dynasty.

She spent 18 months tracking him down and when she finally found him she said "Remember me?" as she approached him.

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"I think you need to take these," she said, handing him bankruptcy papers outside the private New York gym where she tracked him down after 18 months.

Hatton is now being held by the US immigration service for not having a visa.

The divorcee, from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, hired a private detective to track Hatton down in New York and set up a website: youbetrayedme.com to warn other women, posting a photograph of him and explaining her story.

Emails to the site led her to discover that Hatton had been living for the past eight months with a wealthy American divorcee in her £1 million mansion in New York.

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Miss Handy believed the cosmopolitan and well-spoken man was educated at Eton and Oxford before becoming an international economist.

She handed over more than £600,000, believing it would be invested in their future together but he used the funds to enjoy a lavish lifestyle, eating in London restaurants and buying suits and jewellery.

Miss Handy said: "He wore an expensive watch and looked as if he should be on the Amalfi coast.

"I first met him in June 2003 in the Soho coffee shop in Cambray Place, Cheltenham.

"It was my lunch hour and he asked if he could join me. The following week he was in the cafe again and he was extremely charming and friendly. He was kind and gentle, and had a spirituality about him."

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When she met Hatton she was vulnerable as she was divorcing her husband of 11 years. They had three children together, now aged eight, 11 and 13.

After Hatton, who called himself Alex de Rothschild, appeared at the cafe for a third time the pair exchanged numbers and met for lunch. "I was not looking for a relationship but I found myself falling in love with this man," she explains.

She went on: "He told me he was an exceptional student and went to Oxford at 15. He was unusual and I put that down to him being bright and academic. He said he was an illegitimate son of Edmund De Rothschild and all his money was in Swiss trust funds."

Miss Handy gave him £174,381 to pay for a Master of Business Administration course at London Business School.

In September 2005 she says she wired a further £105,000 into his bank account so he could invest the money on her behalf into a Swiss bank.

She says he bought a BMW for £70,000 and clothes worth £134,934. She has receipts for a further £26,212 spent on jewellery from Tiffanys, Beards and Aspreys and £8,335 on restaurant meals.

She added: "He was waking up in the morning and rushing out to Cheltenham to spend money.

"By the afternoon he was in London buying clothes and jewellery, and would eat out three times a day. There were big cash transfers and smaller ones and a financial analysis of my bank account shows between October 2003 and December 2006 I gave him £607,468.

"People will rightly say I must have been mad, but all the time I believed I was genuinely helping him and investing in our future.

"I thought we would live in Geneva and once his course finished he would become a successful businessman in his own right.

"But when I finally saw his bank accounts I realised my money was gone. I was in love with him but I now realise he never loved or cared about me."

The couple's child was born in December 2004.

Miss Handy said: "It only really began to dawn on me what was happening when a relative said 'You aren't involved with him financially, are you?'

"Although we had a son together, he was semi-detached from the relationship all along."

Last July, at Swindon County Court, he was declared bankrupt on a petition brought by Miss Handy. The petition also claimed he was also known by three aliases.

All she has left are hundreds of gift boxes he'd stored and proceeds from the sale of his BMW. She sold the house she bought with the divorce settlement and lives in rented accommodation.

"I know I'm never going to get my money back because he doesn't have any but I do need to see him punished," she said.