A Croydon man orchestrated a million pound fraud using forged passports, 130 false identities and hundreds of illegal credit cards and bank accounts.

Kanagaratnam Ganan, 33, from Lodge Road, defrauded many of the UK's biggest clearing banks in an incredible five-year streak of plundering which netted £1.1million.

On Monday at Guildford Crown Court, Sri Lankan Ganan was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud.

The court was told Ganan had a collection of more than 120 false Indian passports indistinguishable from the genuine article which he had used along with fake utility bills to open more than 500 bank accounts under false identities supposedly living across south London and Surrey.

Police have recovered £380,000 of Ganan's ill-gotten gains, a figure well short of that stolen after he lost thousands speculating on dot-com businesses. Officers said a large chunk of the cash was also used to fund the crime spree.

Ganan's scam took place between early 2000 and late 2004 when he patiently and meticulously transferred money between accounts to give the impression of an ordinary individual making regular deposits.

When the fake account holders' credit rating was good, Ganan applied for loans, overdrafts and credit cards which were looted before the non-existent account holder defaulted and disappeared.

In December of last year, after an eight month investigation, police raided Ganan's home and found passports, about 500 credit cards and thousands of pages of ledger tracking the accounts.

It emerged that he had run more than 200 accounts with Barclays and Barclaycard, 85 with Natwest and many others with smaller lenders.

Barclaycard ended up £424,000 in the red, Barclays Bank was £250,000 down and Natwest had lost £154,000.

Presiding Judge Addison said the fraud must have been a full-time undertaking and commented on the industriousness of Ganan and his two accomplices.

He said: "It was a fraud which required considerable organisation and the result of that, it was difficult to detect. These offences are so serious that a custodial sentence is all that can be justified."

Ganan was sentenced to five years in prison for conspiracy to defraud while his accomplices, Jeyaseelan Rajaratnam, 32, from Sutton, was sentenced to two years for conspiracy to defraud and Tharmalingam Gnanachandran, 33, formerly of New Malden, got one year for three counts of laundering money.

Ganan's two accomplices will face recovery hearings at a later date.