Harry Singer had single-handedly helped 2,017 people to stop smoking in six months, receiving £45 from the health service for each successful case.

His efforts with patches, gum and willpower allowed the NHS trust to shatter its local target and earned him a nomination for a national Stop Smoking Supporter award.

There was only one problem: none of his success stories was genuine.

Yesterday, as Singer was found guilty of pocketing £90,000 from the NHS, the judge lambasted the Government's target-driven culture, which had allowed him to invent an army of imaginary quitters.

Singer, 55, who had been living in a YMCA hostel, had been briefly trained by Kensington and Chelsea NHS Trust as a stop-smoking counsellor in 2006. Using names and addresses of people garnered by canvassing on the streets of London, he built up a team of “quitters”. Using bogus paperwork he then claimed 2,017 successes during a six-month period, 27 times better than the next-best adviser.

Singer, who used most of his earnings to act as a community philanthropist who bought televisions for the elderly and organised social events, was undone only by his own success. NHS officials, keen to discover his secrets and share them with other advisers, discovered that most of Singer's quitters had never heard of him.

Some had kicked the habit years ago and others had never smoked at all. One was on his honeymoon while supposedly undergoing support sessions, and one was a certain Harry Singer.

Singer, of Earls Court, West London, was found guilty at Blackfriars Crown Court of 18 specimen charges of false accounting between March and October 2006 and one count of concealing criminal property.

As he jailed Singer for 18 months, Judge John Hillen was scathing about the trust's operation of the scheme. He said: “This scheme has properly been described as pseudo-medical. To pay lay people, albeit briefly trained, as stop-smoking counsellors for recruiting and spending a few sessions with smokers is an astonishing way to spend public money.”

He described the lack of checks by Kensington and Chelsea Primary Care Trust as “an extraordinary derogation of responsibility”. He added: “This was all driven by the need to meet targets and it is a feature of the target-driven culture of the governments of this country that it can lead to the distortion of proper functions and can lead, as in this case, to the opportunity for fraud.”

The judge said the main mitigating factor was the defendant's altruism. He said that the distribution of funds by Singer, whose marriage and business had failed, to his community became his “reason for living”. He even joined the NHS trust's board where he was helping it to reverse its £26 million deficit for 2005-06.

Diana Middleditch, chief executive of Kensington and Chelsea Primary Care Trust, said Singer's actions should not detract from the “excellent work of the majority of our community advisers”.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “We know that NHS stop-smoking services have been hugely effective in helping people quit.”

Dermid McCausland, managing director of the NHS Counter Fraud Service, which carried out the investigation, said: “This behaviour is completely unacceptable and we hope this conviction will warn potential fraudsters that we will not tolerate the loss of valuable NHS resources for the personal gain of a dishonest minority.”

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