A conman who posed as a wealthy bank customer in a bid to get more that £90,000 transferred from an account has been jailed for 21 months.

Gerard Fernandez, 50, travelled to Bradford from London and even bought himself a smart business suit before going into the Tong Street branch of the HSBC last month.

Fernandez had with him a forged passport bearing his photograph and the name of the intended victim, but prosecutor John Bull told Bradford Crown Court today that the scam was foiled when the branch manager became suspicious.

The court heard the targetted account had recently had a six-figure sum paid into it as a bonus and when Fernandez went into the bank he requested that £91,350 be transferred to another account as part of a property transaction.

Mr Bull said suspicions were aroused because Fernandez was reading details about the other account from a piece of paper and eventually the forged passport was faxed through to the bank's fraud department.

When it was confirmed that the passport was a fake the police were contacted and Fernandez was arrested.

He made no comment during his police interview, but at a previous hearing before the magistrates he admitted fraudulently using the passport.

The court heard yesterday that in 1995 Ferndandez, of Dagenham, Essex, was jailed for four years and three months for his part in a £100,000 counterfeit currency operation.

He had also served a short prison sentence in 2004 for offences involving 'cloned'' credit cards.

Barrister Ken Green, for Ferndandez, revealed that his client's son had been murdered by his partner in tragic circumstances in 2004 and he had built up debts after turning to alcohol and drugs.

He said the information about the intended victim's account must have come from an 'inside informant'' and Fernandez had been recruited in the London area to carry out the transaction.

Mr Green accepted that there was a degree of sophistication in the planning of the offence, but he described the events in the bank as "hamfisted and amateurish''.

He told Judge Peter Benson that although the passport would pass casual scrutiny such a significant sum of money would lead to more careful investigation.

Judge Benson said it had been a premeditated offence involving a large sum of money.

'I accept that you may not have been the major beneficiary of this offence if it had been successful, but you expected to benefit to the tune of a few thousand pounds and you were the one who was central to the plan,'' he told Ferndandez.