A woman has told her incredible tale of emotional and financial turmoil after being conned by the 'Melbourne Tinder Swindler ' Christopher Collins.
Collins was sentenced to 22 months in behind bars Victoria, Australia and managed to con one victim out of thousands of dollars in just a few hours.
In total, it is believed he stole around £58,000 from three women he met online from January 2020 to January 2021.
He will be eligible for parole after 16 months and was ordered to pay back around £5,800. One of his victims included a single mother of four who had to survive on handouts for months after she was conned out of her cash.
Collins has already served 10 months in detention before his sentencing, so could be out of prison in just six months.
The 33-year-old is not the same Tinder Swindler as Simon Leviev - AKA Shimon Hayut - who duped women out of hundreds of thousands by pretending to be the son of billionaire Russian-Israeli diamond mogul, Lev Leviev.
The nightmare for another woman, from Melbourne, began after going on a date with Collins, who told her to put money on a sure bet after claiming he was a professional gambler.
On an evening out, she went to the dancefloor while Collins sat with her phone and transferred the equivalent of £56,466 into his own account and £42,000 of it into betting accounts.
After they went home together, she fell asleep and Collins stole her credit card to use to pay for a taxi and visit a strip joint in Melbourne.
She told AAP that the nightmare continued after she confronted him as he threatened to reveal a supposedly damaging video of her if she told the authorities.
The conman also posed as her mother, threatened suicide and said she owed money to a motorcycle gang.
"It was a nightmare. That confusion and sense of urgency, that's not a scenario that I've ever been in, and you don't know how you'll deal with it."
The financial implications for the executive were huge and around £26,000 of the cash was not able to be recovered. A further £8,700 was spent on lawyers to try and dig her out of her nightmare.
Magistrate Cecily Hollingworth said: "You could have stopped, you could have desisted at any stage but you continued to defraud these women.
"You exploited women that you knew had limited means."
