A LIMO firm boss has been jailed for more than five months for using a customer’s bank card to splurge on jet ski experiences and Dyson products.

Former Brunel Rooms director Jason Ranford had denied the five counts of fraud by false representation but changed his pleas before the case came to trial.

He used the bank details of a woman who had hired a limousine from him to run up hundreds of pounds’ worth of bills. Ranford, whose driving record was described by one judge in 2014 as one of the worst he had seen, ran private hire firms M4 Limos and more recently M4 Partybuses.

Ranford, of Hinton Parva, spent more than £450 with travel agency Hoseasons, £80 at Dorset-based firm Jetski Safaris Ltd, £64 with Stanley Kirk and £319.99 at Dyson.

He also admitted a charge of being drunk and disorderly at Regent Circus, Swindon, on May 5 last year and making threatening phone calls commenting on the victim’s supposed disability.

By committing the latest offences he also breached the terms of a 16-week suspended jail sentence imposed by the Manchester courts in 2018 for fraud.

Swindon magistrates sentenced Ranford to a total of 22 weeks, with the JPs saying the offences were serious because of his long criminal record. He must also pay a £115 victim surcharge.

Ranford’s record includes an 18-week jail sentence in 2017 after he admitted driving a stretch limousine without a licence or valid insurance. He was carrying fee-paying passengers in the Ford limo when he was stopped in June the previous year.

Well-known in Swindon as a former club promoter, lettings boss and courier firm owner, Ranford also has previous convictions for fraud and threatening violence.

In 2015 he was given a series of suspended sentences for stealing almost £1,500 from a woman’s credit card to spend on van insurance and gambling websites.

He held his fingers in the shape of a gun to a man’s head outside a pub and told him: “You are dead tomorrow.”

District Judge Simon Cooper told Ranford at the time: “This was an appalling display of violence and temper. You behaved in a drunken, selfish extreme display of temper that would have terrified anybody, particularly the children watching. Mr Marshall was truly terrified by your stupid, childish demonstrations of using a gun.

“I just hope you will calm down and stop being as aggressive and deceitful as you have been in the past. Perhaps your business and fatherhood will change you.”