The ex-Premier League player persuaded up to 100 friends and members of his family to invest a total of more than £15m in a foreign currency exchange scheme.

Mr Rufus, 48, of London, was found guilty of four counts of fraud by false representation, money laundering and one count of carrying out a regulated activity without authorisation after a four week-long trial.

He was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison at Southwark Crown Court today.

The investment scam operated as a type of pyramid scheme with new investors funding older investors.

Mr Rufus told his victims, many of them family and friends, that he was a successful foreign exchange trader. He promised them high returns of up to 60% and low investment risk.

He told one victim that he only traded five per cent of the capital investment, which meant 95 per cent would have been retained safely, reducing the risk of incurring large losses.

In reality, he used the money invested to pay back those who had paid in as part of a pyramid scheme, as well as funding his own lifestyle.

Mr Rufus also falsely claimed to have made multi-million pound returns for a church and produced good returns for other footballers or ex-footballers, however he declined to name these investors for "confidentiality reasons." He was forced into retirement in 2004 following a knee injury.

According to analysis of his spending during the investment scheme, which ran from May 2007 to the end of 2010, he spent almost £300,000 on shopping, car finance, travel and restaurants.

Of the £15m paid to accounts controlled by Mr Rufus, investors received back only around £7.6m.

Detective Constable Claire Sandford-Day, from the fraud operations team at the City of London Police, said: “Rufus deliberately deceived those who were close to him and those who trusted him to scam them out of substantial sums of money.

“He used his status as a former footballer to make it appear that he was leading a life of wealth as a result of his former career and investments, when the reality was, he was not making profits from his trading activities and was using the money from his victims to pay for his lifestyle.”

Many of Mr Rufus’s victims suffered financial and mental health difficulties as a result of the scheme.

City of London Police said that among the lies Mr Rufus told to his friends and family was that he did not need a licence from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) as there was an exemption that permitted him to trade on behalf of friends and family.

The FCA provided extensive help with the prosecution. The help included sharing information and documents obtained from its investigation, offering technical support on the offence of carrying on a regulated activity without authorisation and the exemption that Mr Rufus was seeking to rely on, as well as assisting with several disclosure requests.

In his original interview under caution by the City of London Police in July 2015, Mr Rufus provided a prepared statement saying that he had done nothing wrong and that his actions were in “good faith”. He then answered no comment to all questions asked.