Miles Hart had a reputation as a guy who could get anything. Friends from the elite private school he used to attend say he once surprised them with an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris on a private jet with less than 24 hours notice.

So when he started selling Glastonbury tickets, hospitality passes and VIP Access All Areas passes – claiming he had privileged access because of land his family owned near the festival site, or by working with a company at the event – many of his former schoolmates jumped at the chance.

Within a couple of years, his sales had gone global, as he struck deals to sell about £1m of passes to punters who had missed out in the annual scramble for official tickets on the Glastonbury website.

But as the day of the 2024 festival approached, Miles’s promises of tickets proved to be a mirage, created out of false invoices and fake email addresses. Miles, now 27, went into hiding.

How did Miles Hart get away with it? The BBC has spoken to some of his former friends to trace the rise of a scammer brazen enough to lie to his dead friend’s family and to run up tens of thousands of pounds in unpaid debts to his godmother along the way. Behind him, he left a trail of destruction: debt, anger and threats.

Miles Hart was sociable, clever and witty – the joker of the group. That is how he is remembered by some of his former friends at Millfield School, which is famous for producing multiple Olympians and sports stars such as Formula One driver Lando Norris.

The £12,000-a-term school in Somerset is just a few miles from Glastonbury Festival’s famous Pyramid Stage. “Everyone wanted to be there. Miles was someone who could get you in,” says Elle, who knew him from the age of 10.

Glastonbury Festival is one of the hottest tickets in the world, usually selling out within minutes. The festival says only tickets bought from its official seller See Tickets are valid and they are linked to photo ID to keep them out of the hands of touts.

But if anyone could offer an alternative way in, they would be able to demand a high price.

Elle says Miles got her a wristband for entry one year and they went to the festival together. After they left school, he began selling tickets.

Seb, another former Millfield pupil two years older than Miles, says he bought a ticket from him for the 2022 festival, the first one since Covid.

He says Miles had told him he had 42 hospitality tickets to sell, which he had been given because his family rented out land for luxury tents at the festival. “I thought it was like an exclusive opportunity and I really didn’t want to miss out,” Seb says.

But two days before the festival, after chasing Miles for months, Seb says he contacted Glastonbury Festival to confirm the allocation of hospitality passes. The festival told him it had never heard of Miles. Seb’s attempted calls to him afterwards were declined.

“I had heard anecdotally that he was partying in Paris and that made me feel incredibly bitter,” Seb says.

Elle’s best friend Cian had also given Miles money for tickets that year and asked for her help in getting it back. Then other mutual friends got in touch to ask Elle if she knew Miles, saying they had also been scammed.

A few months later, Cian died suddenly from a heart attack. Elle and another friend flew out for the funeral in New Zealand, where Cian’s family are from. Cian’s mother asked Elle to get Miles to pay back the £500 he owed, to help with the funeral costs.

Miles sent a voice note saying the money was already in the post. But three years on, the family have received nothing.

In 2023, Miles was at it again, selling Glastonbury tickets to about 50 people and failing to deliver. Kate, another of Miles’s old friends, says she was added to a WhatsApp group with former school friends and acquaintances who said they had been ripped off.

More people in their social circle were added, Kate says. Some said Miles had borrowed money and not repaid it, while one person posted a receipt from a London nightclub with a staggering bill, saying: “Where’s your friend? He owes me £200k.”

People speculated about how Miles maintained his extravagant lifestyle; Kate and Elle wondered if their surprise trip to Paris the previous year had been paid for with “scammed money”.

“Everyone knows someone who knows someone who’s been scammed by him,” Elle says. “And all the whilst he was doing this, he was going on like really crazy bougie holidays and spending crazy amounts of money that probably wasn’t his.”

Elle says this is the moment when she decided she wanted to find out how far the lies had gone.

But Miles was about to pull off his biggest scam yet.

In the run-up to Glastonbury 2024, some punters who had missed out on the official sale were trying to score tickets from two other sources: an Ibiza promoter called Kai Cant who had put out an Instagram story saying he could get hospitality tickets for £1,350, and a company called Star Gaze Entertainment.

Both of them had, in turn, been promised the tickets by Miles Hart.

One of Kai’s customers, a DJ called Danny, was told that Miles had said he ran a catering firm working in the hospitality areas at the festival, which gave him access to tickets. Danny was also told that Miles had said his mother, Susannah Hart, could get tickets through her connections as a local councillor, and that she was not someone who would ruin her reputation by becoming involved in anything shady.

In fact, Somerset councillors have no special access to Glastonbury Festival and Susannah Hart had no involvement in Miles’s ticket schemes.

One of the people who worked at Star Gaze as a summer job, Will, told the BBC he had sold hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of tickets for the company, but he did not know who was supplying them.

In total, customers of Kai and Star Gaze spent almost £1m on Glastonbury tickets to be supplied by Miles Hart.

With weeks to go, Will says the calls and emails to Star Gaze from people asking where their tickets were had become incessant. In group chats, Kai’s customers were also suspicious they had been ripped off.

“If this was all a big scam, would I be on the phone to you now?” Miles said in one voice note message to a panicked Kai.

Miles said he did not want to entrust the tickets to the postal system, so he arranged to meet Kai’s customers in hotels across England to hand them over personally. Will travelled to meet him at a pub in Glastonbury to pick up the Star Gaze customers’ tickets.

They waited for hours with no sign of Miles, in Glastonbury or at any of the hotel meet-ups. Customers could not reach him because he had always phoned them with his caller ID hidden.

Danny says his phone suddenly received a call from a hidden number and he knew it was Miles. “I’ve had problems with my phone,” Miles said to explain his silence. He said the tickets had fallen through because “Glastonbury have found out about them and shut the whole thing down”.

Miles was next seen in a clip on social media – with someone confronting him in the street and demanding his tickets or a full refund of £10,000 by the next day. “Yeah, I’ve agreed to that,” Miles is heard to say.

And then, he vanished again.

Elle wanted to understand the extent of Miles’s deception, so we travelled with her to meet his godmother, Annamaria.

Years earlier, when Miles’s mother Susannah was going through a divorce and was suffering financially with the mortgage and school fees, Annamaria had stepped in. She contributed to the school fees and took over the mortgage, intending to help the family renovate and sell their home.

She says that Susannah Hart ended up owing her £300,000 in total, but that Susannah had refused to sell the house or to resolve the financial issues. Three court cases and three appeals later, and Annamaria ended up owning the house. Susannah Hart did not respond to the BBC’s requests for comment.

When Annamaria put the house up for auction in 2023, to her surprise Miles was at the sale. He bid and won the house, giving a cheque of £90,000 for the deposit. But three days later, the cheque bounced.

She sold the house to someone else, but under the rules of auctions, Miles still owes her the money. “To this day, I don’t understand why he did it,” Annamaria says.

In the house clearance, Annamaria found a box file filled with documents. She showed it to Elle: it contained dozens of bank cards in different names – the names of Elle’s friends.

Elle spoke to her friends who said that, in the first year of university, Miles had asked several people if they wanted to make an easy £100. He told them he would sign them up for a bank account, send them the referral fee and cancel the card.

Criminologist and financial crime expert Dr Nicola Harding told Elle that instead of cancelling the cards, it appeared that Miles had made their friends into “money mules” – people whose bank accounts are used by scammers to quickly create a chain of transactions and make illicit cash harder to track.

“I can’t believe that he would, like, put those people – specifically that he was so close to – I just can’t believe he put them in that position,” Elle says.

Other people felt the fallout from Miles’s deceptions. Kai Cant went into hiding in Spain, saying on Instagram the scam had left him with debts of £500,000 and put his life at risk. And the new owner of Miles’s home told the BBC how he and his wife had been threatened after their address had been posted online.

Speaking anonymously, he said they had been visited by debt collectors, bailiffs, people owed money and, on one occasion, two “very large men” who appeared to want to “cause us physical harm”.

The new owner has now installed eight security cameras, automatic number plate recognition, facial recognition and a network of lasers to detect intruders. “It really is like Fort Knox,” he said.

So where is Miles now? The BBC obtained a covert recording of Miles meeting an unknown man, apparently on the pretext of carrying out a business deal.

In the recording, Miles says he is working for a client who has a “huge cash flow issue” and needs a loan. But Miles claims the client has assets worth almost a billion euros.

The man asks about Miles’s role and Miles admits he has “debt that needs to be paid”. “I was involved in something that went wrong,” he says.

Miles gives an account of how the festival ticket sale went wrong and says one group of customers are angry, but the rest are willing to wait for their money.

The other man then says: “What if I told you that I represent one of these groups? Some of the nastier groups. There’s a lot of people wanting blood.”

He warns Miles that the debt – £480,000 to the group the man says he represents – is not going away, and Miles promises to pay within 56 days. “I am an honest person,” Miles says.

That recording was made last summer, but the BBC understands Miles has not refunded anyone.

Kai Cant said he has paid back everyone who bought tickets through him. Star Gaze Entertainment has shut down and Benjamin Harris, the company boss, cannot be found.

The Metropolitan Police said it is investigating up to 50 allegations of ticket fraud relating to Glastonbury 2024.

Miles Hart was contacted for comment and said, through lawyers, that there were numerous “material errors” in the allegations made against him and that some of the people who spoke to the BBC “cannot be relied upon to represent an accurate portrayal of events”.

His whereabouts are unknown, and he was last spotted at a pub near Glastonbury, a few days before this year’s festival.

• This story is part of BBC Scam Safe Week, which brings together content from across the BBC to help the public stay informed in the fight against scams