A courier company boss from Sussex faces a retrial after two gold-hungry identity thieves were jailed for stealing almost £200,000 from comedian Ricky Gervais.

The fraudsters, who had already plundered a wealthy doctor's savings to buy a couple of bullion consignments, used an unidentified bank insider to secretly transfer The Office star's money to another account.

They then altered a dead pensioner's passport with a picture of the actor's TV character David Brent copied from a DVD cover of the cult series.

The pair had hoped to use his cash to buy a further 27 kilograms of the precious metal.

But they reckoned without a bullion dealer's sixth sense, London's Wood Green Crown Court was told yesterday.

After several phone conversations with someone posing as the comic, "alarm bells started ringing" and he contacted his bank. A few days later two men turned up to collect the gold and walked straight into the arms of waiting police.

Jobless Kenneth Speight, 39, originally from Erith, Kent, but now of no fixed address, was convicted of two counts of conspiracy to defraud between February 21 and April 8 2003. Jailing him for two-and-a-half years, Judge Mervyn Roberts told the former garage parts manager: "It has not emerged during the trial precisely what role you played in the course of the conspiracy and I am conscious of that.

"But it is plain from the nature of the documents upon which your fingerprints appeared your role must have been near to the centre of this conspiracy."

Also jailed was courier Craig Reeves 30, of West Lodge Cottage, Hampshire. He was found guilty of the two conspiracy offences and got two years for his "deplorable" role.

An alleged insider, NatWest assistant manager Sharonjeet Snober, 28, of Arthur Shirley Road, Southampton, Hampshire, was cleared of any wrongdoing. Also found not guilty was Harry Peach, 57, another courier, of Fairfield Walk, Leatherhead, Surrey.

A fifth defendant, courier company boss Mushtaq Javed, 43, of Ashdown Drive, Crawley, faces a retrial after the jury failed to agree on a verdict.

The three-week trial heard the well-planned fraud would have been impossible without a bank insider to identify wealthy account holders and provide the partners in crime with all the information needed to authorise inter-account cash transfers over the phone.

The jury was told the first to be targeted was Dr Amein Darwish and his wife Janet.

They were in Saudi Arabia when someone claiming to be the doctor rang his bank in Chichester and arranged for £127,000 to be paid to City bullion dealers Gold Investments Limited.

After using the money to buy 18 kilograms of gold, which has never been recovered, the identity hijackers targeted the TV comic on April Fool's Day.

A fax was sent to his bank authorising the transfer of £195,480 from his account to Baird & Company, another bullion firm.