A romance fraud victim handed over more than £40,000 to scammers who were behind a fake profile of a man called 'Kevin Thompson'. The scammers were later caught and brought to justice by police.
Di Pogson only realised she was the victim of a cruel con when she had nothing left to give and had been asked to sell her engagement ring. She has explained how skilled the scammers were at making her feel guilty when she had nothing left, SurreyLive reports.
The so-called 'Kevin Thompson' began by asking for money for his sick dog and lulled her into a false sense of security, 'he' also said all the 'right things' to her. Romance fraud is when scammers approach people through dating sites, social media or through messaging platforms such as WhatsApp.
Fraudsters in her case were ordered to pay their victims back more than £80,000 after Surrey Police had worked through webs of bank transfers and messages in a case heard at Guildford Crown Court in January 2020. Di got around £1,000 of her money back, but said even after the scammers were arrested she did not want to get her hopes up of getting any money back just to be let down again.
Di's case
Di had decided she no longer wanted to be alone after the sudden death of her husband in 2014. She turned to online dating to look for a companion, somebody to share her life with and suffered some of the usual horrors of people using profile images that were "20 years out of date".
She said: "And then there was Kevin, who seemed very nice. He shared my love of dogs. He had lost his wife very suddenly. And we had various things in common.
"We chatted on the phone, he sounded quite well spoken. He said the right things to me."
Di said she was shocked when she found out at trial that in fact it was a group of people that had been scamming her, and not just one person behind the messages. Although she did say that once she had printed all the messages out it was obvious they were all written by different people.
She said: "How can a group of people be so horrid and so evil to somebody who is not in a good place and vulnerable? But they see it as a job. They have no morals whatsoever, and they just see it as doing paid work, like going to the office for the day."
How the scammers do it
Di described her dog, a black lab called Daisy, as her "saviour" after her husband died. And the first thing scammers asked for, within a couple of weeks of starting talking to Di, was money to help pay vet bills because "Kevin" said he was away on business and couldn't pay the bill.
Though she says she doesn't feel like this any more, when Di first found out she hadn't been talking to a real person it felt like another loss to her, saying she felt "despair". But she said: "If I was still thinking that way, they've won again. And they're not going to, I'm the bigger person."
Di said her son-in-law told her not to send any money to anyone she had met online when she mentioned it to them, and that she told them she wouldn't. But she ended up being persuaded by "Kevin". She said she was "lulled into a false sense of security by the fraudsters" who knew how to get more money out of her.
She said: "And then they've got you hooked. I always thought that I was very savvy wouldn't fall for it. But I did.
"Towards the end I kept saying no, and they are amazing at turning it round and making me feel guilty." Feeling "like a teenager", Di said she told the fraudsters about her family, that they knew she had grandchildren.
She said: "He knew a lot about me, more than I would normally tell people. He was very clever at getting it out of you."
Di says her advice would be to ask for an in-person meet up with anyone you meet online, in a very public place. She says: "If they're not real, they'll disappear."
She added: "If you are a victim, go to the police. Yes, it's embarrassing, you feel shameful. But they can't do anything about it if they don't know."
