Serial conman emerges in model revival.

SERIAL fraudster Brenton Jarrett is back with a new name and a new game just six months after pleading guilty to a string of frauds committed under a fake identity in Albury.

Using the name Joshua Rankin Kells, the 40-year-old convicted conman has resurfaced as the boss of a modelling agency. As well as heading Vexus Models, Kells is a former designer for Italian fashion label Versace – or he would be if he were real.

Vexus was registered as a business in New South Wales on January 31 by Brenton Jarrett. On March 19, ownership of the business was transferred, official documents show, to Ernest Brian Hitchcock.

The relationship between the Jarrett and Hitchcock names is a strong one. In March 2010, The Age reported that Brenton Jarrett, whose list of convictions stretches back to the 1990s, had surfaced as ”Joshua Hitchcock”.

Professing to be the grandson of film director Alfred Hitchcock, Joshua claimed he was about to launch film and television production company Hitchcock Media International (HMI) with a Melbourne-based remake of the US sitcom Cheers. But the Cheers remake, HMI and Joshua Hitchcock were all fabrications.

The Age investigation revealed how Jarrett had constructed an elaborate web-based identity over many months in support of his Hitchcock scam, complete with fake websites for his company and doctored entries on legitimate Wikipedia pages, whereby references to ”Joshua Hitchcock” were strategically inserted in a bid to lend his fictional identity credence.

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