Six months ago, Nicky Oakley was packing up her three-bedroom house, buzzing with excitement to move into her dream ‘for ever home’ with her partner and their three children.

The four-bedroom Victorian property, set in sprawling gardens, was supposed to mark the beginning of an idyllic new chapter.

Instead, the move exposed a nightmare scenario. Unknown to her, Nicky had a six-figure debt and her home was in the process of being repossessed, after her signature was forged on court documents.

While she should have been sipping champagne, a stunned Nicky was learning that her boss – and friend of nearly 20 years – had defaulted on loans secured against her property. To cover his tracks, he had forged emails from solicitors and faked Nicky’s signature.

Forced to turn legal sleuth to fight for her home, Nicky discovered she wasn’t the first person to lose thousands to James Kenny. In 2008, he had been handed a two-year suspended sentence after admitting to forging his own wife’s signature on a second mortgage application, even setting up a fake law firm website to trick her. (They have since divorced.)

Further digging revealed he had duped other employees: Nicky knows of at least four other women who say they’ve lost thousands after being conned by the same man.

Shockingly, despite Nicky reporting what happened to Merseyside Police and the Report Fraud service, no action is being taken against Kenny. Meanwhile, she has no idea if she and her children will even have a roof over their heads by Christmas.

‘My life is in absolute tatters,’ says Nicky, fighting back tears. ‘I’ve been used by a man I’d known for decades and am on the verge of financial ruin. I feel like such an idiot for falling for his lies, but I trusted him implicitly.’

Nicky met Kenny in 2007 when they worked for a luxury wedding venue in Cheshire. Charming and ambitious, Kenny was the operations manager. ‘He was such a likeable guy, the life and soul of the party,’ says Nicky. ‘He was a little eccentric, but that’s the kind of person you sometimes need in events. He was good at his job and we worked well together.’

The pair worked closely for around 18 months before Nicky left to have her first child. ‘He’d message every few months, even asking if I wanted to work for him a couple of times. I was working freelance around my children, and although I appreciated James’s offers, the timing was never quite right.’

After a contract ended in 2023, she contacted Kenny to see if he had any jobs that might suit her. He claimed to have the opportunity of a lifetime: he was launching the world’s first pirate-themed festival, complete with pirate ship, working cannons and a crew of actors.

‘James thought it was a multi-million-pound idea and was already looking at rolling it out across Europe,’ says Nicky. ‘It was easy to get caught up with his enthusiasm.’

He offered her the role of director of operations with a salary of around £50,000, plus a £10,000 bonus.

‘I couldn’t resist the opportunity,’ Nicky said. ‘Ironically, I was actually glad to work with someone I liked and trusted again.’

There was just one catch. Kenny explained that the project was waiting on the arrival of a guaranteed lottery grant and he needed a short-term loan to get things off the ground. He claimed he couldn’t take out a loan totalling £60,000 himself because he was living in church accommodation, following the death of his father, a vicar.

He asked Nicky to act as a guarantor, using her home as collateral.

‘I don’t consider myself to be someone who takes financial risks,’ Nicky explains. ‘I went over the paperwork in minute detail, checking a letter confirming the lottery funding [a document Nicky later discovered had been faked]. 

'James assured me the £4,000 a month repayments would be no problem and I believed him. He hadn’t come to me with the idea, I’d asked him for work. I thought I knew him really well. Now, I feel like such a fool. It was the worst decision of my life.’

While waiting for the festival budget to kick in, Nicky juggled a part-time job as a teaching assistant with meetings with suppliers. But within three months, she received a letter stating that Kenny had defaulted on the loan repayments. 

‘I called him in an absolute state,’ Nicky recalled. ‘I was on the verge of tears, asking how he could do this to me and why hadn’t he paid.

‘He assured me that there had just been some teething problems with the payments being set up and that the money was there.’

At the same time, Nicky received a letter regarding the lottery grant, explaining it would not be awarded due to fraud checks. ‘I was absolutely furious with James,’ Nicky recalls. ‘The lottery money was supposed to pay off the loan – I was terrified.’

Again, Kenny had an answer; he claimed to have had a business partner years before who’d been convicted of fraud. Nicky recalls: ‘He was apologising to me. He appeared devastated and as shocked as I was that his connections meant we’d had the money taken away.’

While Nicky looked up his former business partner, she didn’t think to search under Kenny’s name, too.

His solution was simply to take out a second bridging loan – totalling £142,500 – to cover the first and buy Nicky some breathing space. Nicky felt she had no choice but to sign as guarantor for the second loan, to stop her home from being taken.

‘James somehow managed to suck me in and reassure me,’ Nicky recalls. ‘He’d be on the phone going, “Don’t worry Nicky, I’m sorting this, I’m not going to let you lose your house.”

‘He’d always managed to solve problems when we worked together before so I trusted him.

‘He was utterly convincing, telling me the loan company must have made a mistake with their letter to me because he’d had communication that it was all in hand. I wanted to – and needed to – believe him.’

To reassure her, Kenny put Nicky in touch with his solicitor. After weeks of anxious email exchanges, in June 2025, Nicky finally received written confirmation from the solicitor that the entire debt had been cleared in full. She also received an official Satisfaction of Charge certificate – confirming that she was no longer responsible for the debt. 

‘It felt like a weight had been lifted,’ said Nicky. ‘My house was safe and I even felt a little guilty for not trusting James when he’d told me it was going to be sorted.’

Three months later, Nicky and her partner found their dream Victorian home in Cheshire and put their house on the market.

The brutal truth unravelled just days before they were due to exchange contracts. ‘I was standing in my living room, with boxes everywhere, just a few days before we were due to move,’ Nicky explained. ‘I got a call from our estate agent, saying: “Nicky, we can’t proceed, there’s a repossession order on your house.”

‘My head started spinning. I rang James, sobbing, asking him what was going on. He told me there must be some mistake but I just didn’t believe him any more.

‘I grabbed all my carefully filed documents, walked to my nearest solicitor and begged someone to help me.’ What the solicitor uncovered over the next few hours was horrifying.

The debt clearance letter had been a forgery, a court repossession order was already under way – and Nicky’s signature had been forged on a court consent order in August 2025. This must be signed by a homeowner in the case of a repossession in order to agree that their home is to be forfeited to pay a debt.

Nicky recalls: ‘My hands shook with fury as I read the email chain with messages supposedly from me to the loan company, consenting to them taking my home. The rose-tinted spectacles just fell from my eyes. James wasn’t there to talk his way out of it; I had black-and-white proof that my signature had been forged. Nobody else could have done it. He’d been playing me all along.’

Even the correspondence with Kenny’s solicitor was fake. Although he had indeed had dealings with this solicitor in the past, he’d not practised for years and had no idea his name had been used. Kenny had created a spoof email address in the solicitor’s name, forging legal correspondence – including the Satisfaction of Charge document – to keep Nicky in the dark.

‘I called James in tears and, incredibly, he still pretended he didn’t know anything about forged documents,’ says Nicky. ‘Later, he sent me a number of video notes telling me not to worry – and admitting he had signed the court document, not me.’

Rather than apologising, he was still trying to give the impression they were in it together.

‘My world collapsed. I felt so guilty that I’d got my family caught up in this mess, guilty for the other people in our chain who had lost their houses – I’d been completely fleeced.

‘Not only had we lost our dream home but we were weeks away from losing our current one.’

In November 2025, it transpired that Nicky owed £215,000 to the loan company, which included additional fees implemented by them as a result of non-payment. While she has been fighting the repossession of her home, further interest and legal fees mean the amount she currently owes is well in excess of £250,000, a figure that continues to rise.

Nicky’s solicitor advised her to contact the court to delay the repossession. Furious and terrified, Nicky reported the incident to the police, too. But after months with no movement, she had to resort to using her own detective skills. What she discovered left her sickened. Kenny was not just a dishonest boss – he was a convicted fraudster.

‘I felt such an idiot when I typed “James Kenny and fraud” into Google and found a local newspaper article covering the case of him fraudulently signing his wife’s name on mortgage papers.

‘I knew instantly he’d done the same to me.’

Nicky sat open-mouthed as she found more articles reporting on other fake festivals Kenny had claimed to be running – and other victims who explained how he had also ‘employed’ them and never paid them, or persuaded them to invest before defaulting on payments.

‘I’ve since connected with other women he’s duped. Talking to them has made me feel less alone, but the reality is I am still fighting for my home.’

In May, Nicky attended a court hearing to stop the repossession. Although the judge expressed deep sympathy for her plight, the court ultimately ruled in favour of the lender. Legally, any case against Kenny would be treated as separate to the loan company pursuing Nicky. As the guarantor of the loan, her house was the collateral should he default.

The judge at the first hearing ruled that, regardless of any later deception, the lender was entitled to recoup their money.

A spokesman for Merseyside Police told the Daily Mail that Nicky had reported the incident to Report Fraud but that they cannot comment on the case. Report Fraud said: ‘[This report] was assessed by the Report Fraud Analysis Service at the City of London Police but has not been passed to a police force for investigation at this time.’

Meanwhile, Kenny has pocketed more than £200,000 from the two loans. It goes without saying there was never a plan for a pirate festival. Unbelievably, he has repeatedly told Nicky he doesn’t want to fall out with her over what has happened although he hasn’t been in touch since she confronted him over the forged documents. She has heard that he is now living in France. When approached by the Daily Mail, Kenny did not respond.

Nicky has managed to delay the repossession by asking for an appeal and is arguing that the repossession should never have gone ahead as the order was not signed by her.

With legal fees mounting, she has been forced to set up a GoFundMe page in a desperate bid to save her property before the court deadline passes.

‘I’m embarrassed that I’ve had to set up a crowdfunder to pay legal fees,’ Nicky admits.

‘People have kindly donated almost £2,000 but it barely touches the sides.

‘I want James Kenny to face justice – but right now, my only priority is keeping a roof over my children’s heads.’