[quote] Paedophile behind fake Disneyland wedding ‘had 50 false identities’
A convicted paedophile who staged a series of stunts to get close to young girls has at least 50 known aliases and is under investigation for fraud, The Telegraph can reveal.
Jacky Jhaj, 39, described as a “dangerous sexual predator”, has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on fake film shoots over the past five years.
He was arrested in Paris last week after spending around £100,000 attempting to conduct a fake wedding to a nine-year-old girl at Disneyland.
Before that, Jhaj turned a National Trust property into a film set, hired the Odeon Leicester Square for a fake premiere and set up a dance school for eight to 14-year-old girls at which he turned up in a Bugatti supercar to greet them.
Jhaj was jailed for four years in 2016 after being convicted of sexual activity with two 15-year-old girls he had picked up after driving around Hounslow, west London.
He gave the girls a lift in his Range Rover, bought them meals, alcohol and gifts and pretended to be a film producer.
French prosecutors said Jhaj faced several counts of fraud, abuse of trust, money laundering and identity theft.
How Jhaj has been able to fund his lavish stunts, and repeatedly spend vast amounts of money for no discernible financial purpose, has never been uncovered.
The Metropolitan Police has now confirmed, for the first time, that an investigation into “ possible fraud offences” committed by Jhaj is under way.
Court documents obtained by The Telegraph, following a recent hearing at Isleworth Crown Court, reveal that the sex offender is known to use “multiple aliases”.
“He has used these aliases to book female child actors from casting agencies; to book into hotels; and to organise events attended by female children. In addition, he has attempted to give false names to the police when stopped and questioned.”
The court papers go on to state that “[Jhaj] has gone to great lengths and significant financial expense to engineer situations in which he is able to have contact with female children, including those under the age of 16”.
The Telegraph has tried to speak to Jhaj’s family members, former business partners and staff who have worked on his stunts. No one has either been willing, or able, to provide an explanation for his wealth.
Jhaj’s family home is a neat, well-maintained semi-detached with a Range Rover Vogue parked in the drive on the edge of the suburb of Bedfont.
But neighbours said they now rarely see the family, who were described as being “friendly and always happy to say hello” before their youngest son’s bizarre stunts and sexually predatory behaviour became widely known.
One elderly neighbour said: “I used to see the mother and father quite often, coming and going, and they were always polite and friendly. But since all this happened they’ve pretty much hidden away. It’s a great shame.”
He added: “The father is retired and I don’t know how their boy, Jaskarn, got the money to do that stuff. It must have cost a lot to hire all those people and the locations. I’ve no idea where he got it from. Seems crazy.”
In July 2024, Jhaj pleaded guilty to two breaches of a notification order and a breach of a sexual harm prevention order, Isleworth Crown Court confirmed.
The charges related to a fake film shoot he staged in Leicester Square, London, in October 2023, where 200 children and young women were recruited to appear alongside Jhaj as fans.
In April 2024, he used Backstage, an internationally renowned casting platform, to hire child actors in order to stage an elaborate fake funeral, costing £10,000, at the London Oratory.
The funeral was held for Lauris Zaube, a 23-year-old Latvian man who went missing after a New Year’s Eve party near an iced-over dam west of Riga, Latvia.
Jhaj is said to have posed as the missing man’s brother, wearing dark glasses and using the name “Clyde”.
The funeral was cancelled after the “mourners” revealed that they were actors and began complaining they had not been paid.
