‘As soon as his mobile rang dead I knew I had been had’

Online dating scams have been blamed for a rise in the number of reported frauds. Sarah Freeman reports on when romance goes bad.
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Like many victims of online dating scams, Nicola does want to be identified. All she will say is that she is in her late 40s and up until she discovered she had been conned had always considered herself to be pretty streetwise.

Her reticence is due to embarrassment. She doesn’t want her family and friends to know that she freely gave away thousands of pounds to a man she had never even met.

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Nicola joined a dating site six months after her divorce was finalised. She and her husband had met as teenagers and, having had no real experience of the dating game, decided that meeting a man online would be less daunting than joining a traditional singles club. Ironically, as it turned out, she also thought it would be safer.

“I knew friends who had joined dating sites and they all seemed to have had a really good experience,” she says. “I liked the idea of being able to vet the profiles of potential dates and get to know people before actually meeting up.”

A couple of weeks after signing up, Nicola had been contacted by half a dozen men, but one stood out. Pete ran a successful aviation business in Cape Town, but was looking to come back to Britain.

He said he had gone through an acrimonious divorce five years earlier and having been awarded custody of his young daughter had only just plucked up the confidence to begin dating again. It also helped that the photograph he posted of himself had a touch of the George Clooney about it.

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After a few weeks exchanging messages, Nicola agreed to give Pete her phone number and most evenings they would chat for at least an hour, often more. On her birthday a month later he sent flowers and each time they talked it seemed he was a little closer to securing the sale of his business and returning home.

“We were seriously planning our future together,” she says. “He was going to come across for a couple of weeks to check out places for him and his daughter to live and that’s when the email landed. He said his ex-wife had lodged a claim for a percentage of any money he made from the sale of the business.

“While it was being investigated he said his assets had been frozen and he couldn’t find a way to pay for the flights.

“I don’t know why alarm bells didn’t start ringing, but they didn’t. I was really desperate to see him, but he said he didn’t know when everything would be sorted. It was even my idea to loan him the money and later that evening I transferred £5,000 to a bank account he said belonged to his best friend.”

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When she got an email from the friend telling her not only that he had safely received the money, but also how happy Pete had been since meeting her, it seemed the cash flow problem was just a minor blip.

“It was after I sent the second lot of cash that the emails stopped,” says Nicola.

“As soon as I called his mobile and it rang dead I knew that I had been had. It was honestly like the scales fell from my eyes. I felt so incredibly stupid and for a while I just wanted to pretend it never happened.”

When Nicola did eventually report what had happened, she quickly realised that she wasn’t alone.

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Figures released yesterday showed online dating scams have contributed to a 27 per cent increase in the number of reported frauds. The racket has developed along with fake online auctions where web-users attempt to buy products online but are never sent their goods.

Some 229,000 frauds were recorded in the last year – up by 27 per cent on the 181,000 of the previous period, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

Of these, online dating scams accounted for 1,212 of the crimes reported, while bogus internet auctions made up around 23,000 of the offences.

With victims now encouraged to report crimes to Action Fraud, which acts as a central point of contact for help with financially-motivated internet crime, rather than visiting a local police station, the rise in fraud has been partially attributed to a change in the way data is collected, but the internet has become a stalking ground for organised gangs looking to get rich quick.

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“Our advice is trust your instincts,” says a spokesman for Action Fraud. “If it feels wrong it probably is. Never send money or give credit card or online account details to anyone you don’t know and trust and never reply to communications from someone who you meet on a dating site or chat room and then wants continue the communication by email.”

Good advice perhaps, but with the number of people falling victim to online fraud rising, it may be too late.