LOVE RATS: THE RISE AND RISE OF ROMANCE FRAUD. BY SANDRA HARRIS.

 

LOVE RATS: THE RISE AND RISE OF ROMANCE FRAUD.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I’ve been watching a documentary show on Netflix recently called LOVE RATS, narrated by former EastEnders actress Daniela Denby-Ashe. It features some of the most unbelievable footage I’ve ever seen of real people who’ve suffered through what we now call ‘romance fraud.’

Though it’s only recently that we’ve found a name for it, it’s something that’s probably existed since the dawn of time. The strange thing is that nearly all of the victims- mostly female, but one or two men as well- have such exactly similar stories to tell that it’s like there’s an actual template for this kind of crime.

The victims are often middle-aged women who’ve been widowed or they’ve just come out of a long marriage. They may have married when very young and have therefore almost no experience of dating in the modern era. They decide they’re ready to meet someone again and they go to online dating sites like Tinder or Plenty of Fish. They can’t believe their luck when they meet the Man of their Dreams there…

The photo of him shows a good-looking middle-aged guy with nice eyes and a cute smile. The victim and this guy message frequently at first. The conversations have that ‘new relationship gloss’ and, more often than not, our lonely widow/divorcee can’t believe she’s struck it so lucky as to meet a man this attractive, with whom she has so much in common.

They may talk on the phone, but, often, there’s only online interaction between the two of them. Also, the man frequently presents to the woman as wealthy, with millions in the bank and a brand-new Land-Rover in his driveway.

He has a job on an oil-rig halfway across the world somewhere, or he’s got numerous properties he’s trying to sell and, once the money from the sale comes rolling in, he’ll be on Easy Street for sure and it’s all terribly exciting and glamorous for our victim, who can’t believe her luck in ‘meeting’ this mysterious jet-setter of a man…

Then, out of the blue, the man asks for money. He’ll pay it back out of the monies he’s expecting from the sale of his houses; it’s just that it hasn’t come through yet and he needs the dosh from her to ‘release’ the big money, as it were.

The female victim is already head over heels in love with this guy, so, even though she’s a bit puzzled as to why such an obviously wealthy bloke would need her money, his reasoning is plausible so she takes out her credit card and does what he asks…

In pretty much every case, it just snowballs from here. She wants to meet this man to whom she’s given so much money, so he arranges to come home to England for Christmas/her birthday/Valentine’s Day. 

She gets all excited but, just as his flight’s meant to be landing, he messages her phone to say he can’t come because there’s a big business emergency in his job and he’s got to go straight back to Dubai/the oil-rig/Jupiter/wherever.

It's very disappointing but he sends her a card saying he loves her and their two hearts beat as one so, boy, is she appeased! He needs more money, though, for whatever reason. She doesn’t have it, so she takes out a loan/uses her daughter’s piggy-bank savings/uses the last of her own rainy-day fund and gives it to him, because she can’t risk the relationship ending, not when she’s so obviously found the man of her dreams.

Some of the scenarios are reconstructed with actors and actresses taking the roles of victim and fraudster. Real-life friends of the victims' come on the show and say how they probably suspected all along that the bloke was a wrong ‘un. 

Many of them might even have tried to talk their friend out of handing over more money to ‘Dave’ or ‘Steve,’ but there’s no talking to them because they genuinely believe that they’re in a loving, two-way relationship. It just looks like sour grapes on the friend’s part if they try to put the brakes on the victim’s wonderful new relationship.

One woman gave forty grand’s worth of her precious family jewellery to some guy to pawn. One man actually got his old mum to help scam an innocent woman. Often, a second or third man is introduced into the scenario and the female victim will be asked to ‘store’ money in her account before sending it on to these strange men’s accounts, and here you have what is known as money laundering.

Another woman genuinely believed she was sending money to the Hollywood actor Gerard Butler, because the man scamming her used the actor’s photo as his own profile picture online. I wonder why she thought GB would need her money to pay a bill? 

It’s bizarre stuff. Often, the photos the fraudsters are using as their profile pictures are stolen from other, completely innocent, people on Facebook or other social media sites, so your tall, dark handsome new bloke might just be a bald fatty from Deptford or somewhere equally unglamorous.

One of these online men ‘proposed’ marriage and sent the woman a hideous home-made ring so ugly that even a child wouldn’t consider it a suitable engagement ring.

The victims on the show gave literally thousands of pounds to these fraudsters, only to receive nothing in return. Sometimes, it turns out that the man they’ve been messaging is only the tip of the iceberg, or should I say pyramid?

There could be loads of guys working with the scammer behind the scenes, even sitting at a desk like the scamming is a proper job, which it is for them. It’s heartbreaking stuff. When they realise they’ve been scammed, the victims are literally shell-shocked.

But . . . but . . . but he needed that money to save his business/pay for his mum’s- or daughter’s- funeral/buy himself out of a foreign prison/pay for a flight home to England to meet me . . . How can it all have been lies . . . ?

Why were these women so gullible? Why did they believe excuse after excuse, lie after lie after lie? Did they not think anything was wrong when their ‘beloved’ cancelled all face-to-face meetups, lied about their job or financial situations, made fake proposals of marriage but never followed through on them? Like, how did they not see all this coming?

The answer is that these women are all extremely vulnerable and looking for love. My kids and I watched all two seasons of this show, growing more and more appalled by each subsequent story. We’d never be so green, so naïve, so blind and so stupid as to fall for such crap, we told each other. We’d have more sense.

Then I told my kids about a time in the early days of mobile phones when I was scammed in a very small way by a boyfriend. Oh, I wish I could text you but I’ve no credit, so I guess I’ll see you when I see you, was a favourite gambit of his.

Naturally, I nearly tripped over myself running to the shop to buy him phone credit, which of course is what he’d intended all along. My point? Even the sharpest among us can be taken in from time to time, and I have never considered myself to be amongst that elite.

To lose your life savings, your children’s school fees, your mother’s jewellery, your handsome new boyfriend-slash-fiance, your bright new future and maybe even your home in one fell swoop must be devastating. Your self-esteem is in shreds, and you can no longer trust your own judgement.

Then there’s bank and police involvement, and you’re having to admit to them that you gave one hundred and twenty thousand pounds of your own money to a man you’ve never met. Never even talked to on the phone. How humiliating and embarrassing is that? The chances of them recovering all or even part of your money are slim, to say the least.

So, why didn’t these women on LOVE RATS  know that they were being taken for mugs? Well, I guess because there weren’t any shows like this in the old days to warn them. (A lot of the scams featured on the show took place in the late ‘Noughties.) Shows like this will bring home the message to women-and men- that they need to be careful when trying online dating. At least I hope so.