According to his three Facebook pages, Alain Barataud is a professional football player, a recruiter and a Frenchman living ‘‘in the land of kangaroos’’, who travels the ‘‘international circuit’’ playing poker.

But a Sun-Herald investigation has found the Sydney father-of-five is also a bogus FIFA hospitality agent, deploying a sophisticated ticketing scam over the past three World Cups, including the recent Brazil tournament, which has fleeced companies and families out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

He also pulled the same stunt before the 2007 Rugby World Cup in France, costing a New Zealand-based events company more than $1 million in losses, eventually sending them broke.

And last week Barataud ripped off an Australian family whose son had attended the same Sydney primary school as his own children.

He convinced Sergio Silva and his nine-year-old boy Tiago to travel to Brazil and pay for World Cup final tickets that never existed, leaving them stranded on the streets of Rio last Sunday when they should have been inside the historic Macarana stadium, enjoying football’s glittering showpiece.