Case study: Anna
‘It felt like losing a husband’: the fraudsters breaking hearts – and emptying bank accounts.
Source: The Guardian, 10th January, 2022
In February 2019, Anna, a finance professional in her 50s, joined the dating website Zoosk. She had been single for four years, recovering from an incredibly difficult, abusive marriage. “I was finally ready to meet someone,” she says.
So, when she met Andrew, a handsome Bulgarian food importer living in London, she was thrilled. The pair were soon spending hours talking on the phone each day. Anna was smitten. “He showered me with love and affection,” she says.
If you imagine candy floss, I was the stick and he was the sugar wrapped around me. I felt as though I was floating.
They made plans to meet up, but Andrew told her he had to go to France for an urgent business trip. They continued to speak on the phone and also, occasionally, on video chat. About five weeks after they first made contact, Andrew asked to borrow money; just a small amount. “He told me he’d had a work crisis and needed help with port charges for a delivery. He was so distressed by the unexpected charge. I felt sorry for him.”
These figures are likely to be the tip of the iceberg – Action Fraud says the shame and stigma around romance fraud mean many people don’t report it.
Things soon got worse for Anna – Andrew’s requests began to snowball. He told her his daughter was unwell, then that she had died and that he desperately needed money for repatriation and funeral costs. Anna checked the charges were legitimate, before sending money directly to a funeral services company in France. Whenever she became suspicious, Andrew assuaged her fears. “I’d be sucked back into his all-powerful love bubble. I was also getting receipts for many things and he constantly had an explanation for me.”
The following year, Andrew had more unpaid charges on his shipping containers. Then, in March 2021, everything got more serious – he told her he had been taken hostage by loan sharks and was being tortured. “I was absolutely distraught. He said he was being stripped and beaten, and sent me pictures of his broken arm. He was locked in a room with no windows.”
In the summer of 2021, when Andrew claimed he was still being held hostage, Anna asked a French Facebook group if anyone had seen him. One reply astonished her. “A woman contacted me and told me the man I’d posted a picture of was Juan Soler, an Argentinian-Mexican actor. She tried to explain I’d been scammed, but I couldn’t believe it.” Anna confronted Andrew, but he said he could explain and “made me question how I could doubt him”. Anna’s new Facebook friend, meanwhile, spent months trying to convince Anna to call Action Fraud. “I pointed out that we’d had video calls, but she told me he’d been using technology to superimpose a moving image.”
Despite the mounting evidence against Andrew, Anna didn’t want to be responsible for his death at the hands of loan sharks if he was telling the truth. By the time she had been convinced to sever ties with him, in October this year, she had lost £350,000.