A PAEDOPHILE from York who once conned aviation bosses into thinking he was an industry tycoon – in a scam likened to the plot of hit film Catch Me If You Can – has been jailed for two-and-a-half years.

Adam Hathaway, 22, also known as Adam Bentley and Adam Barraclough, four times defied a lifelong court order aimed at protecting children from him, York Crown Court heard.

He also went secretly to Thailand, from where he was deported, and to Cambodia. En route, he tried to persuade airline crew he was cabin staff and related to a UN worker.

His previous convictions cover an eight-year career of fraud during which he duped aviation bosses into believing he owned his own airline company.

He has been committing frauds since he was 12 and, aged 17, persuaded aviation bosses he was an industrial tycoon.

Recorder Benjamin Nolan QC jailed him for 30 months for four breaches of a sexual offences prevention order (SOPO) which banned him from contacting children among other conditions.

Hathaway, formerly of Earswick Close, Earswick, and Charing Cross Road, London, admitted all the charges.

He was on parole at the time from a sentence of nearly four years imposed in 2011 for sexual offences against girls aged seven and eight and setting up a bogus modelling company so he could touch girls under the guise of measuring them.

Recorder Nolan told him: “For a man of 22, you have the previous convictions of an elderly paedophile.”

His solicitor advocate Maria Temkow said Hathaway was desperate to be accepted by others and loved the theatre because it had been the scene of his happiest childhood days.

Nicholas Rooke, prosecuting, said Hathaway worked in the scenery section of a stage production company and persuaded a PA to bring her children aged four years and seven months into his office, where he met them in the summer of 2013.

He also got a job at the Phoenix Theatre in London which staged productions for children and held a bogus casting audition at a drama school for children.

On October 8, 2014, despite being forbidden to leave the country without telling the police, he caught a flight to the Far East via Qatar from Manchester Airport.

Miss Temkow said he had not sexually abused any of the children involved. He was still a very young man who was learning that he had to abide by the SOPO.