When the family of a Dublin woman heard their sister had found love online, they were just a little suspicious.
When they heard their sister had yet to meet the man who had stolen her heart, their suspicions grew.
And when they heard she had been sending this man thousands of euro for the most outlandish of reasons and had “married” him in an online ceremony, they became certain she was the victim of a romance scam.
But while they told her of their concerns immediately and repeatedly, almost as immediately and as repeatedly, she dismissed those concerns and said they were wrong and that she had found true love.
Since she was first contacted by the supposedly successful businessman who called himself John and who said he travels so often between Germany and Japan that he has been unable to meet her even once, she has sent him a family inheritance of more than €20,000 to cover his short-term cash flow issues.
She has also borrowed €5,000 from one sister to pay for her heating to be fixed, but spent the winter living in a cold house after sending that money to him too. She tried to borrow more from another sister, and her niece, and has now become estranged from her family who, she believes, are meddling in her affairs and trying to break up her relationship.
At the time of writing, she still believes that she has found true love despite all the evidence to the contrary, and is at risk of losing all the money she has in the world, along with her home and even her family – all because of the most malevolent manipulation carried out by criminals without even the semblance of a scruple.
While the Garda and the woman’s bank have been alerted, it would appear there is little that can be done to save her from herself and from John.
This is the story of a romance scam unfolding in real time. While the details are as upsetting as they are inexplicable, her family wants us to highlight the story to show the damage such deceit can do to both the victims and their families.
The first mail we received, from a reader we shall call Martha, started by noting that her sister – who we shall call Mary – “is highly intelligent but extremely gullible”.
She was ripe for the picking, it said, and “the scammers have her so convinced of her relationship that she is cutting all family ties. She will not answer our calls or WhatsApps. We believe that she has lost over €30,000 so far to this scam. She will not talk to me since I refused to lend her €67,000 for her distressed lover, who needed to pay a business debt and is now ‘stuck in Japan’.
Mary made more contacts with family members looking for cash. One sister offered to pay for her heating to be repaired directly. ‘Mary was very annoyed that our sister would not give her the money,’ Martha says
“My other sister, my daughter and I are at our wits’ end trying to find a way to convince her that she is being scammed, but she will not believe us. My sister is now totally alone as she has cut us all out of her life and she has no friends in Ireland. She is in her 50s and on disability allowance. Our fear is now that the scammers will convinced her to sell her house and deposit the proceeds in their account. We are broken-hearted and feel powerless to do anything.
“My reason for this letter is to highlight how powerless we are against these criminals when we can see exactly what is happening. Our last link to our sister has just now been broken, as she has shut out the last person who could talk to her. Families are [being] torn apart as these scammers are so good at what they do. We don’t know where to turn and fear that even when my sister is left homeless and penniless, she may be too proud to contact us for help.”
The horror story began last summer when Mary told her sisters she had “met a lovely man” on a dating site.
“His profile said he was called John and came from Dublin,” Martha writes. “She sent on screenshots of his photo from the website. She said he wanted to take it slowly.”
Martha asked Mary whether she had actually spoken to the “lovely man” in person, and she said no. “He was shy about meeting up,” apparently.
Mary had been caught out a couple of years earlier in an investment scam, and Martha reminded her of this and advised her to be careful and “not to divulge too much information about her finances, and to be careful in case John from Dublin asked for money”.
Mary assured Martha that she would be very careful, and there the conversation ended.
Unfortunately, it is not where the story ended.
Weeks passed and the “relationship” continued. Mary sent a link to her new man’s company website and told Martha not to worry. She assured her that everything was above board and she pointed to the website as irrefutable proof that John’s company was legit.
The siblings were in regular contact, and the new man came up a lot in conversation. Mary kept telling her sisters that her new lover was shy and “only did occasional video calls”.
She also explained that they had yet to meet in person because he had to go away a lot to Germany for work.
At this stage, she assured her sisters, that they were still “just friends”.
In October, some four months after the story began, Mary asked her sister for €5,000 to allow her carry out essential repairs on her house. She also said she planned to register for the rent-a-room scheme and use the money she earned from that to pay her sister back.
Martha had no problem whatsoever in lending her sister the cash, and the money was transferred almost immediately.
Weeks later, Mary was on the phone again, and this time she was looking for €67,000 in order to help John through some “temporary financial difficulties”.
She also told Martha she was now engaged.
The alarm bells were now deafening, at least from where Martha was standing. Mary couldn’t hear the bells though, and sent a picture of a cheque for more than €1 million that her fiance had sent her “as proof of his finances”, with a promise that they would be able to cash it in when he returned home from Germany – after which they would start their new life together as man and wife.
[ ‘I gave my brain the day off and fell – hook, line and sinker – for the scam’Opens in new window ]
The story was to get even worse.
Mary and Martha’s niece got a call from Mary, asking for €7,000 so she could get her heating fixed.
The niece didn’t have the money, so that call went nowhere.
The whole family were by now very, very alarmed by Mary’s behaviour. When they told her how worried they were, she assured them that all was well.
“She admitted that it might look like a scam to an outsider, but was certain it was all above board,” Martha writes. “She said the job he had in Germany was being paid for by a company who had a head office in Japan. They had paid him for this big job by cheque, but he was unable to cash the cheque because his bank account had been frozen. He had to fly to Japan to speak to the head office because all the workers were owed their wages. In the meantime, he just needed €7k to pay a solicitor in Japan a deposit to ensure that he would honour his hotel bill over there.”
If that seems outlandish, things were about to get even more unbelievable.
Mary showed her sister the cheque the man had posted to her for safe-keeping until he could get home to Ireland “and they could live together in a house he owned in north county Dublin. The cheque was on flimsy paper, but Mary would not listen when she was told that companies pay by bank transfer, not by cheque.”
Mary implored her sister not to worry – that “everything was above board and she was very excited to be helping her fiance get back home to her”.
The family felt they had no choice but to go to the guards. They were, Martha says, ‘sympathetic, but said that we couldn’t make a complaint on someone else’s behalf’
By now it was November, and Mary had made more contacts with family members looking for cash. One sister offered to pay for her heating to be repaired directly. “Mary was very annoyed that our sister would not give her the money,” Martha says. “She said she had a bond maturing at the end of January for €30k and will pay everything back then.”
By this stage the family were desperate, and having found it impossible to get through to their sister, they did some digging of their own.
Using a reverse image search, they were able to find out who the man claiming to be John actually was. The real face of the fake romance was, it turned out, a man based in San Francisco.
So the family alerted Mary to this fact – only to have her dismiss their concerns again. And so they moved to make contact themselves with the man in the photo.
“We told him we had seen the same images that are on his Instagram account on our sister’s phone,” Martha says. “He replied that it wasn’t the first time his image had been stolen. He offered to video call Mary to verify his identity, as he had done this previously with another woman to convince her that she was being scammed. He told us he is gay and had a husband for 27 years – so romancing women is not his thing!”
[ What can, and cannot, be done about romance scams? Opens in new window ]
Mary dug her heels in and said she “was perfectly fine and said that she didn’t want to speak to me or my sister about this any more and that she wanted her privacy respected”.
It was now the dead of winter and Mary’s house was cold, Martha says.
“After a few pleasantries, I asked why she wouldn’t allow my sister to pay a plumber to fix her heating,” Martha continues. “Mary immediately became angry, saying that we were patronising her, sneaking around behind her back. When I told that we had only been investigating because we were concerned that [the man] wasn’t who he said she was, she said that he was her husband now and that she didn’t need the church or State to validate that marriage. When asked where her husband was and why she wasn’t living with him, she shouted that it was none of our business and she ordered me to leave her house.”
The family felt they had no choice but to go to the guards. They were, Martha says, “sympathetic, but said that we couldn’t make a complaint on someone else’s behalf. A garda said that no crime had been committed and that if Mary had been defrauded then she, as the injured party, would have to make the complaint. He offered to get a Garda car to go and do a welfare check, but it was felt that that would only serve to anger Mary and push her further into the arms of the scammer.”
The story was still unfolding at the end of last year when the family rang their sister’s bank and were put through to the fraud section.
“The person was very sympathetic, agreed it seemed like a scam, but due to data protection couldn’t divulge any information about transactions on Mary’s account. He did say that he would write out to her and ask her to contact the bank and verify transactions. However, he said that if Mary said they were genuine transactions, that they couldn’t tell people what they could and could not spend their money on,” Martha says.
Since then they have tried over and over again to reach their sister and make her see that she is being conned. At the time of writing, the scam was still unfolding.
