AN EAST Lancashire man has been accused of carrying out a £90,000 eBay fraud.

Jonathan Hartley, 26, is alleged to have created a string of false identities on the internet auction website to cheat more than 1,600 customers, police said.

Police allege that he has been advertising various goods for sale on the site - but then not delivering them while still pocketing the proceeds from the transactions.

Hartley, of Scotland Road, Nelson, was arrested following a nine-month investigation by Detective Constable Simon Robinson, of Pendle CID.

The alleged victims of the suspected scam are thought to live around the country.

Hartley was formally charged with the fraud last Friday at Burnley police station.

He is accused of two individual offences, of money laundering and supplying counterfeit goods, between January and August last year.

Hartley also faces 18 further fraud allegations - 13 specimen offences and five roll-up' charges alleging ongoing scams over the same time period - and will appear before Burnley magistrates on May 12.

The charges are mostly understood to relate to computer memory sticks - which are used to store sound, image and video clips.

A Lancashire police spokesman said Hartley was alleged to have set up numerous eBay user names, using fictious names and addresses.

Police said they believed he had later used these addresses to allegedly defraud 1,637 individual eBay users by advertising goods for sale that he has then failed to deliver, and depositing the money into his bank account.

An eBay spokesman said: "We can't comment on a specific case until there has been a conviction.

"But we work very closely with the police and last year alone, we helped to secure over 200 arrests and guilty verdicts in nearly 70 cases.

"We train more than 500 police officers every year on how to work with us and the information we can offer to assist with their cases."