An online travel business using a Tacoma mailing address appears to be the latest foray into the U.S. market by a serial fraudster based in the United Kingdom.
The News Tribune recently interviewed the lead investigator on Darren Anderson’s case overseas, as well as one of Anderson’s former U.S. employees and a vendor in Minneapolis who shared invoice-related emails and said Anderson owes tens of thousands of dollars for services.
Anderson of Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England, has become known to U.K. investigators and in headlines overseas as a “fantasist” who’s bilked individuals of more than £200,000 ($264,520) through his actions across 13 companies during 2022 and 2023.
“The worry is obviously he’s gone into America,” David Snasdell, chief investigator with The Insolvency Service’s North West Criminal Investigation Team in the U.K., told The News Tribune. “He was doing this whilst he was waiting sentence.”
Timeline of events
Anderson filed articles of incorporation for two Washington state companies on Jan. 5, 2026, signing the documents as “Dr. Darren Anderson,” which he also used in his email signature in communications from The Holiday Travel Agent.
“Darren Anderson was a doctor only in his own mind,” Snasdell said in a release following Anderson’s conviction in the U.K. case, as it was one of several versions of his name and aliases used overseas.
Anderson’s two companies, The Holiday Travel Agent and The Holiday Travel Group Inc., both have active seller-of-travel endorsements with the state, according to Christine Anthony, communications manager with the Washington Department of Licensing.
Such endorsements are required for “any business engaging in selling, or advertising to sell, travel services or travel-related benefits,” according to the state Department of Revenue website.
The companies are set up to host travel-business platforms, and their licenses are set to expire at the end of January and February of next year, with no complaints registered for either one as of Oct. 9, according to Anthony.
A Better Business Bureau listing for The Holiday Travel Agent Inc. of Tacoma includes a business start date of April 2023, with the business starting “locally” in September 2025 and incorporated in January 2026.
An “about” page for The Holiday Travel Agent USA offers a different timeline: “Since 2000, The Holiday Travel Agent USA has been dedicated to making cruise vacations accessible, affordable, and unforgettable for thousands of satisfied travelers … with decades of experience and expertise.”
The BBB listing includes a logged complaint on the bureau’s website entered in March. The company was not BBB accredited.
According to the complaint, $80 was not refunded to an individual: “They did not provide my login credentials for my membership, I requested for a refund but my money has not been refunded.”
The business contended in the posted response that a refund was issued, which the individual continued to dispute.
The address associated with the business is a suite number at the Blackwell Mansion in Tacoma, a site that leases office space, though in this case, not to Anderson’s company.
Stevie Roush is office manager at the mansion. In response to questions from The News Tribune, Roush said via email, “Blackwell Mansion provides shared office space for physical tenants and virtual mailing address services for remote customers.”
Roush explained, “The tenancy referenced in your inquiry is a virtual mailbox arrangement through Traveling Mailbox (travelingmailbox.com), rather than a lease of physical office space. The individual or business does not maintain a dedicated office at Blackwell Mansion under that arrangement.”
Roush added, “Use of the property’s mailing address does not constitute an endorsement, sponsorship, partnership, or agency relationship with Blackwell Mansion LLC, its owners, or its management. Virtual mailbox customers operate independently and are not authorized to speak for or represent Blackwell Mansion. We do not manage or direct their business activities.”
She directed further questions to the company itself.
Calls to the toll-free number listed for the business went directly to a voicemail identifying itself as an “AI receptionist” for The Holiday Travel Agent Inc. A call on Oct. 9 to the 253 area code number used in Anderson’s email revealed that it was no longer in service.
Recruiting and the discovery
Lucia Fletes, a Southern California-based travel agent, was at first happy to land remote work with The Holiday Travel Agent USA, after a recruiting firm sought her out based on her online profile.
“My profile matched a client that was looking for travel advisors,” she told The News Tribune. “So that’s how I got in this job. Motion Recruitment facilitated the communication with Mr. Darren Anderson.”
She understood it was a Washington state-based company in Tacoma. Company CEO Darren Anderson’s email signature listed not only a toll-free number for the company, but also a 253-area code number as his direct line.
Looking for work, she was happy to take the interview, and later the job, which offered decent pay, flexible work schedule and the ability to work from home.
Her interview July 9, 2026, was odd, she recalled.
“He didn’t have a lot of questions for me during the interview, but he was receiving a lot of incoming calls in the middle of our interview process,” she said.
“And what really kind of threw me off was he was vaping in the middle of an interview.”
She said she didn’t want to say anything to him about the vaping because Motion Recruitment told her he was about to have or just had “a procedure” done in the U.K.
“Before any of the interviews started, I did my research. I wanted to see if I can find a profile for him on LinkedIn, Facebook, any type of information on him and the company. But nothing was coming up,” she said.
When she asked about the lack of information online, she said Anderson told her, “We’re in the middle of a rebrand because I’m in the middle of revamping the website, because I’m a host agency. I work with these other vendors.”
When she asked him what he was looking for in a job candidate, he responded, “I’m just looking for somebody that’s a self-starter that knows what they’re doing,” she recounted.
She recalled that the interview lasted around 45 minutes. “Fifteen minutes later, I was given a call back by Motion Recruitment, saying, ‘Oh, he wants to hire you. When can you start?’“
She said she also assumed he had dual citizenship, and that possibly was why the company was in Washington state, but she added that he avoided any direct explanation.
“He said, ‘Right now I need to take care of a couple of medical things, and then I’m going to come back to the states,” she recalled. “I thought maybe he’s going to the U.K. because he can get treatment in the United Kingdom for more affordable than here in the U.S.”
In her short time working with Anderson, Fletes said she never booked a cruise for any customer. Much of her time was spent sorting emails, inquiries and responding to Anderson on a Slack channel established for the company.
Preserved images of their Slack chat shared by Fletes included advertisements posted by Anderson touting special travel deals created using artificial intelligence.
“All I do is send screenshots and just give it a command and it does this,” he wrote to Fletes in the chat.
“How long does it take you to make each one?” she asked.
“About 30 seconds,” he responded.
Condolences and bill collectors
When the condolence email landed in Fletes’ company inbox on Friday, Sept. 25, 2026, her world took a turn.
The condolence, from a vendor, was in response to a mass mailing Anderson’s husband, Marcus, sent on Anderson’s email notifying everyone of Anderson’s death on Wednesday, Sept. 23, and the dissolution of the company she worked for.
“I open it, and it’s like, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss, our deepest condolences. We know that this is a delicate time,’“ she recalled.
It was signed by a representative for the vendor. The email was to collect on billing.
“He doesn’t have a husband. He didn’t die on the 23rd as that letter alleges as I was in court to see him being sent to jail the following day,” Stefan Pidluznyj, media representative for The Insolvency Service, told The News Tribune.
The Insolvency Service is an investigative UK government agency that tackles fraud cases among its other duties involving debt collection for creditors.
Anderson, 43, on Sept. 24, was sentenced to four years in a U.K. jail for fraud involving scam businesses overseas. The Tacoma business was not part of the case that led to his conviction.
In the U.K. case, it came to light that Anderson used several aliases over the last 15 years. According to the government news release, “The court also heard he had seven previous convictions for 41 dishonesty offenses since 2002 … .”
He previously was jailed for fraud and banned as a company director for 15 years in 2011 and had appeared most recently in U.K. court in 2021 as Timothy Ahlbeck, receiving a suspended sentence for fraud and breaching his director disqualification, banned again from serving as a company director for 15 years.
Fletes also kept a Google Drive folder from her time with Anderson’s U.S. agency and shared its contents with The News Tribune.
The documents include Slack channel work conversations between Fletes and Anderson. Those online chats detailed his repeated insistence of her strictly following his instructions of how to register with various business-related entities, and sending all-caps messages to her when she didn’t.
“He’s had a career out of committing offenses. All of a sudden, (he) sets up companies and then defrauds people for services, goods, etc.,” said investigator Snasdell of The Insolvency Service.
Snasdell spoke with The News Tribune in an online interview Oct. 9.
“He’ll purchase goods and then not pay for them and then sell them on. That’s the sort of thing he does,” Snasdell said. “(He) sets up virtual offices. On this case, he’s set up three hairdressing salons, pet food — selling pet food online — the travel agencies … lots of different things.
“And unfortunately, some people are gullible and fall for his ploys.”
‘Lucia, it’s not good’
Things fell apart quickly on the day the email announcing Anderson’s purported death began circulating among the small handful of employees for The Holiday Travel Agent USA.
As Fletes’ colleagues found more information, she said that one told her, “‘Lucia, it’s not good.’”
“I’m like, ‘What do you mean it’s not good? So she says, ‘Google it,’ and then that’s when I saw the first headline.”
“Fraudster who claimed to be a lord and doctor jailed,” wrote the BBC. The release from the U.K. government stated, “Businesses and individuals were left more than £200,000 out of pocket through Anderson’s actions across 13 companies during 2022 and 2023.”
Snasdell has referred to him as a “Walter Mitty character … a man who showed pure contempt for the insolvency system and his creditors.”
Mitty was a fictional character portrayed in James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, who imagines himself as different heroic characters.
In the government release, Snasdell said, “Through his various identities, (Anderson) disguised his offending on an industrial scale, giving no consideration whatsoever to the trail of destruction he left in his wake.”
Speaking with The News Tribune, Snasdell added, “His own defense barrister described him as a sort of tragic individual” who lived with his dog, “and that was it.”
When asked about Anderson’s defense, Snasdell said Anderson hadn’t really offered one, except “just to say he’s a bit compulsive. He hasn’t really given any reason why he does it, unfortunately.”
Pidluznyj, the media representative for The Insolvency Service, told The News Tribune that none of Anderson’s U.S. dealings was part of the U.K. prosecution or conviction.
“The offenses he was convicted of took place in 2022 and 2023 – but it was brought to the attention of the judge who considered it when sentencing him,” he added. “It also meant that the barrister representing Anderson was unable to rely in mitigation on the argument that he was a reformed character who had changed his ways.”
The U.S. business dealings came to light when an email with his “Dr. Darren Anderson” signature from his Tacoma business came to U.K. investigators, and his “claim to run a successful USA-based cruise business was brought to the attention of the judge,” according to Pidluznyj.
“Tacoma itself wasn’t mentioned in court, but the email was, and the judge said that while it didn’t form part of the conviction, he ‘couldn’t ignore it’ either,” he added.
“Tacoma was essentially discovered because Anderson himself put it in the email.”
Why Tacoma, of all places?
“God only knows,” Snasdell said. “He’s a total fantasist.”
Moving on and seeking accountability
Fletes did get her paychecks on time, though she said medical benefits were still deducted on her final week, which she believes should not have occurred.
Among the questions she still has about Anderson, one stands above the rest after being recruited by a third-party agency: “Why wasn’t he vetted? How did he get so far into the United States with all this, and get away with it?”
Motion Recruitment had not responded to a request for comment on Oct. 9.
Stephanie Lee of Minneapolis owns a website that she describes as a Yelp-like site that connects people to different businesses, “like travel agencies to different businesses.“
She first contacted The News Tribune in October about Anderson and contends he still owes her business $30,000 in advertising. She also shared a video interview from her company with Anderson that occurred January 2026, in which he described wanting to bring a “different approach” to agents and customers, and said he’d started in the travel industry six years ago.
He also noted that “a lot of people like the British accent.”
“We’re very lucky because ours isn’t money out of pocket,” she told The News Tribune. “ It’s not like we were a consumer that bought a trip with him, and he didn’t put the money towards it, and we don’t have a trip.”
She was among those to receive the death announcement from “Marcus” and reached out to others who were included on the group email.
“When he sent that letter to all of us, there are a lot of companies involved. Maybe 70% didn’t write me back, but the ones that did, some of them were hit, some of them weren’t,” she said. “But there’s a lot of people affected, and his employees, you know, they’re really shook up about what happened, and so I want to make sure that he gets held accountable.”
Lee shared a copy of a complaint she’d submitted to the Washington State Attorney General’s Office in the previous days. She’s also put a warning about Anderson on her website.
A media representative for the office told The News Tribune on Oct. 7 that they didn’t yet have any record for the complaint but noted potential processing delays. An auto-reply she received from the office stated that “We are experiencing a higher than normal volume of complaint submissions and as a result our review time is taking longer than our standard 10 business days.”
The website for Anderson’s Tacoma business remains up, along with Facebook and Instagram pages, though the click-to-book option on the website for advertised cruises is disabled.
For Snasdell, Lee and Fletes, the more people know Anderson’s backstory in the United States, the better.
“He’s got four years in custody,” Snasdell said. “The likelihood is he’ll be out in probably 15, 18 months.”
“It was a dream job until it wasn’t,” Fletes said. “It is going to be an interesting story to tell at parties.”
Debbie Cockrell has been with The News Tribune since 2009. She reports on business and development, local and regional issues.
