A serial fraudster has been jailed for 21 months after claiming his family died in the Grenfell Tower fire to obtain thousands of pounds from a victim relief fund.

Anh Nhu Nguyen, 53, was sentenced today (February 9) at Southward Crown Court as he tried to claim £12,500 for his lies.

The judge told the Beckenham man: "The offences to which you have pleaded guilty are ones which you committed knowing full well what the consequences were.

"I do not accept that the acts were in some way an attempt to be part of a community and that you were in some way reaching out in order to be embraced by that community.

"I am sure from everything I have seen... that despite your low IQ you knew full well what you were doing. You knew that you were taking advantage of these genuine victims at this terrible time of this terrible tragedy."

Keima Payton, Nguyen's defence barrister, said a report showed his client to have an "astonishingly low" IQ and that he suffered from long term post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and low empathy.

The Grenfell Tower fire on June 17, 2017 took the lives of 71 people.

Nguyen was born in Vietnam, has been in the UK since the 1980s, is a British citizen and has 17 aliases.

He has 28 previous convictions for 56 offences spanning more than 30 years, including theft, dishonesty offences, arson and grievous bodily harm.