One in eight romance scam victims are in a relationship when they first make contact with the fraudster, according to a law firm. Of those who have fallen to the scammers, nine out of ten meet the con men or women online. National Fraud Helpline solicitors have found the vast majority of romance scam victims, who had been defrauded while in a relationship, were already looking for a way out.
Senior Partner Martin Richardson said: “It seems in nearly every case the romance scam victim who was already married or had a partner when they fell for the scam were deeply unhappy in their existing relationship. We have had victims who have looked for a way out of toxic relationships through online dating sites or been targeted on Facebook. It is typical of scammers to target people who are vulnerable in some way. We want to be clear that there is no judgment on our part and if you have been a victim or a romance scam while in an existing relationship we are here to help.”
The law firm said dating sites like Match.com and Tinder are full of scammers waiting to prey on vulnerable men or women. Victims are often lonely and will turn to these online sites looking for friendship rather than a relationship but are frequently manipulated by the scammers who bombard them with loving messages, according to Mr Richardson.
The fraudsters will frequently wait months before asking the romance scam victim to send any money. Mr Richardson said: “We’ve seen cases where the scammer will further turn the victim against their existing partner and encourage them to leave the relationship while using it as an opportunity to extract funds.”
Last month we reported how a retired care worker’s life was ‘torn to bits’ by a callous romance scammer who stole £22,000 after meeting her on a dating site.
Julia Simpson, 68, (not her real name) had joined Match.com to make friends when she met a man using the alias ‘Daniel Peeters’ in May last year. Peeters claimed to be a 58-year-old widower from Cambridge, but unbeknown to Julia was using photographs stolen from a German journalist.
Over the next four months, the fraudster wooed Julia with romantic phone calls and expensive flowers, but was feeding her a web of lies. After being tricked into falling in love with the scammer, Julia sent him more than £22,000 between June and November when he concocted a variety of tales as to why he urgently needed to borrow money.
Fighting back tears, Julia said: “It left me absolutely torn to bits. I sometimes sit down and cry. He told me he loved me and we would get married, but it’s not just the emotions and it’s not the love bombing. We were in tune mentally in a lot of ways, and he betrayed my trust.”
The pair began talking regularly on the phone, when Peeters told Julia he was originally from Ghent, Belgium but now lived in England with his teenage son. The pair even arranged to meet in June, but Peeters pulled out at the last minute, claiming he had to go to New York to discuss a business deal and to buy some gold.
At first, the requests for money were small, including asking Julia to pay £50 for a pre-paid SIM card for his mobile phone, which he said could only be done in England. But as the scam became more elaborate, Peeters’ requests grew larger. He claimed his bank account had been frozen for buying too much gold and he was trapped overseas.
The fraudster even sent a faked bank account receipt which appeared to show he had £2 million. Julia subsequently wired thousands of pounds to bank accounts nominated by Peeters, who claimed the account holders would then meet him in New York and hand him the money. And just when she thought he had managed to book a flight home, the scammer called and claimed he had been in an accident.
“He was frantic, and told me he was phoning from the hospital,” she said. He told me he had hurt his foot, knee and chest in a road accident in a taxi on the way to the airport, and he needed money for cortisone injections. I could hear what sounded like a monitor machine beeping, and I believed him.”
Julia’s doubt set in, but when she accused Peeters of scamming her, he replied asking to marry her. I’m still taking it all in that it really was a scam, and I just can’t get my head around it,” she said. “I always thought I was switched on and canny. But now it’s finished, over. I’ve got to start thinking of myself.”
Julia’s finances were so dire she started looking at debt management plans. In a fortunate turn of events, solicitors from the National Fraud Helpline were able to recover all of Julia’s lost funds under a fraud reclaim scheme. Julia said: “I was shocked, pleased, and relieved to get the money back, mixed in with guilt. It means a lot, because it makes me feel less stupid. My judgement was wrong. I will never do this again.”
The solicitors which work as a branch of Richardson Hartley Law were able to ensure £22,000 was returned to her account. But the firm is warning that scammers are increasingly targeting older women on dating sites such as Match.com and Tinder.
We also told how a heartbroken widower has been swindled out of his £85,000 life savings by what he thought was his dream woman. Former aid worker Rodrick Lodge, 69, realised he had been conned after he landed in Kenya, hopeful of meeting his would-be bride.
When no-one greeted him at Nairobi’s airport – the brutal realisation of his predicament hit him hard. He said: “I’ve been such a fool. It feels like my life is over. I even helped her out with a bit of money over the years, paid for car repairs, things like that. Looking back I now realise it was so bizarre. Last summer Mary told me she had a friend, Anita, who lived in Karen, a suburb of Nairobi. She put me in touch with her.
“We started exchanging messages on Viber. She told me she was MD of a beauty company and had 30 employees. She sounded successful, she said she was having a house built in Voi, about 200 miles from Nairobi.”
He also enlisted the services of Richardson Hartley Law in an attempt to recover his funds. Martin Richardson said: “It is a classic case of a romance scam. When these large sums of money were being transferred we would have expected, in accordance with that voluntary code, the bank to have made pretty stringent enquiries as to why the monies were suddenly being moved in such large sums. If those obligations had been followed we think this scam could have been either stopped completely or stopped a lot earlier.”
In the last five years alone, the financial impact of dating scams in the UK has exceeded £400 million, according to figures from Action Fraud. Between January 2020 and December 2024, nearly 40,000 crime reports were classified as ‘dating fraud’, with victims suffering an estimated total loss of £409.7m.
For more fraud help and advice visit: www.nationalfraudhelpline.co.uk
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