A woman targeted by cruel scammers has spoken out on This Morning about her catfish ordeal. Helen, who only went by her first name on the ITV morning show, told how she was lured into an online relationship, thinking it was with her pop hero George Ezra.
Helen, 51, spent months thinking she was communicating with the 29-year-old Brit Award-winning singer, whose hits include Budapest, Shotgun and Green Green Grass. She is now warning others by recalling her heartbreaking story of betrayal.
Mother-of-three Helen, who had been divorced for eight years, was a big fan of George's music and typed a message on the Facebook page for the star to thank him. "I heard him playing in a shop and I literally burst out 'yay it's George,'" she explained to hosts Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield.
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"I wrote that on his page. I wrote 'you make us smile, your music gives us joy and thank you' and I got a reply from the George Ezra official fan club. It said 'send us a DM' and so I did and then nothing happened.
"A couple of days later I was looking through my friend requests and there was George Ezra 'hi number one fan.'" Helen continued: "He said 'my manager's asked me, because the album is coming out, to get in touch with some of the fans and touch base with the fanbase.'" Presenter Phillip, who praised her for her bravery in sharing her story, pointed out: "We've got to say all the way through this, it wasn't him."
Helen recalled that two weeks on, she and the catfish - a term for when someone sets up a fake online profile to trick people to get money out of them - were exchanging up to 40 mesages a day. "He even said "I could marry you," said Helen.
And she explained: "I turned him down because I'm so so much older. He's in the spotlight, I've got a family. It wasn't right. It kind of felt I was supporting him as a fan, not like that."
At one point Helen tried to phone him. "And he blocked it...and then sent me a message back 'I'm in the studio, don't call me during the day.'" The scammer also warned her against telling anyone about their messaging "for press reasons" and Helen was also asked to come off social media and change her email address.
However, she admitted to never speaking on the phone unusual due to having busy lives. Eventually her daughter became suspicious. "I didn't tell her about it at first because I knew she wouldn't believe me,' Helen said.
Her daughter then contacted the show Catfish UK, which helps people find out who they've really been talking to, and they asked if she'd ever been asked for money, which she had. The fake George had told Helen he wanted to meet her but, so as not to spark suspicion, insisted it would need to be via a meet-and-greet which would cost her £5,000, then bumped down to £2,500 when she said it wouldn't need to include travel costs to get to London.
She said: "He put a lot of pressure on, 'come on it isn't that much money. Don't you love me then?'". Then Helen got a call from an alleged loan company at 6am advising that a loan of £26,000, which she had never applied for, had been successful.
This was followed by a fake call from New Scotland Yard telling her they believed she'd been part of a bigger scam and she was asked to move the money into another account so it would be safe. When Helen was given a number to verify herself, which was the old New Scotland Yard number and kept going to voicemail, the "penny dropped."
"It was hard but I decided how I felt, how he made me feel, whoever this person was, that I liked that and I was going to take that with me," she told Phil and Holly. Asked how she feels about trusting people now she replied: "It's made me think twice about trusting people but no I still think there's someone out there."
And she added: "I love George still, absolutely." In a statement read out on the show George said: 'I'm shocked and saddened to hear that a fan of mine has been taken advantage of in this way.
"I hope that the authorities can find a way to help police and deter the rise of catfishing and that innocent people can be protected from anyone looking to deceive and defraud them."
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