A pensioner who lost thousands of pounds through a seemingly bogus property agent said he has been left feeling “like I don’t want to get up in the morning”.

As Philip Edwards, 69, battled a diagnosis of bowel cancer, little did he realise he would lose tens of thousands of pounds when selling his property in Hawarden last year.

Mr Edwards sold the three bedroom house, which had belonged to his parents, through speedyproperty.co.uk and was told it was valued at £140,000. The website speedyproperty.co.uk is no longer active.

However, Mr Edwards, now of Mostyn, only ever received around £69,000, with the company citing insurance cover and property value as a reason for the lack of full payment.

He said: “I’d seen an advert in the paper to release cash quickly from property and rang the number.

“I was told someone would come out to see me and needed to get it moving pretty quickly.

“I was told they had solicitors sorted out for me and I’d become that ill at the time I was in the Maelor.

“Every time we asked for paper work though, it never came.”

Mr Edwards said he was concerned by the lack of contact from the company which operated all correspondence through a PO box.

The pensioner added he is still paying a £120 council tax bill on his former property and when he lived in the address on which he paid rent, he was evicted after falling ill and being unable to keep up repayments.

He said: “I couldn’t get housing benefit because the council thought I was sitting on all this money.

“Quite frankly I don’t want to wake up in the morning, I don’t know from one week to the next what will go wrong.

“I’d been that ill, it became a secondary issue and it’s taken all the spark away and depleted me.”

Mr Edwards is being represented by a Portsmouth-based law firm which was contacted by the charity Age UK after receiving reports of other individuals who had filed similar complaints.

Solicitor Nigel Cole, who is representing Mr Edwards, said: “I know of four such cases and how deep this goes, we don’t know.

“It’s difficult to say the depth of all this but these people have had their lives destroyed.

“They’ve lost everything.”