Grieving widow conned out of $63K in Facebook romance scam | #datingscams | #lovescams | #facebookscams

Weird But True

By Tracy Swartz

Her mineral man wasn’t rock solid.

A grieving British widow says she was conned out of $63,000 in life savings by a “romance scammer” who preyed on her via Facebook.

The sexagenarian, known only as Lyn, was tricked into sending a fraudster called “Derek” cash for hospital and hotel bills — until she cashed in her pension and there was no money left to give.

“I didn’t have an inkling he was a scammer at all,” Lyn told SWNS. “He used to ring me up at least once, maybe twice a week on the phone. He sounded very genuine.”

Lyn said she met Derek in a Facebook group for bereaved widows in 2020.

They hit it off after he struck up a conversation with her.

Derek said he had recently moved from Manchester, England, to Dubai, where he owned a mineral company.

“We got talking and we had loads of banter,” Lyn recalled. “He was a [widower], so I thought, ‘Oh, we’ve got something in common.’ The pain I’m feeling, he’s feeling the same. And it just went on from there.”

Four months into the relationship, Derek lamented that he needed money to cover the costs of injuries his staff had suffered in Dubai.

Lyn decided to help him out after he agreed to pay her back “with interest.”

“There was an accident that happened over in Dubai where he was working and six of his employees got injured, and he had all these hospital bills to pay,” Lyn explained. “Would I help him with them? He said, ‘I’ll pay you the money back with interest, don’t worry about the money.’”

She was also persuaded into paying his hotel bill and opening cryptocurrency accounts so she could send more cash to him and his “business associates.”

“Eventually, I’d run out of money, so he then said, ‘I’ll get my business partners to transfer money to you through my secretary, and then if you can transfer it through bitcoin to me,’” Lyn shared.

All the meanwhile, Derek went so far as to take and edit pictures from the internet to fool Lyn into thinking they were a couple — even though they had never met in person.

Lyn didn’t want to tell her family what was going on.

“I was more embarrassed about bringing the subject up with my family, so I kind of kept it away from them, but I have a close friend who I told, and she just said, be careful,” Lyn recalled.

Lyn learned that the relationship was a sham when police officers from Cheshire, England, visited her in January 2021.

“I thought, I’m just a normal woman in a normal everyday life. It won’t happen to me, but unfortunately, it does, it happens to anyone,” Lyn cautioned.

“These romance scammers look for vulnerable people, so be careful what you share on Facebook, what you tell people. Keep your cards close to your chest,” she added.

The good news is, Lyn was able to get her missing money back following a police investigation — and she has since found a loving new partner.

She met him online, too, but plans to go on vacation with him soon.

She is warning others not to get entangled in similar online romance scams.

“They know what to ask and what to tell you, what you want to hear — that you’d only hear from your husband and what have you,” she said of cyberspace crooks.

“And then they kind of reel you in, and then you’re into this relationship and they keep promising to come over and meet up,” she complained. “You keep sending the money out and it’s never-ending, there’s always something.”

Cheshire police constable Jim Day is urging vulnerable people not to be in a state of denial known as “betrayal blindness.”

“It’s tempting to ignore doubts and see what we want to see, being the promises of a relationship,” he stated. “Romance fraudsters prey on and exploit the insecurities, gaining trust over prolonged periods of time before money is transferred either in the form of gifts or through a request for help.”

US law enforcement agents have warned that these scams tend to ramp up around Valentine’s Day, when despondent people may be feeling lonelier than usual.

In New York, a financial advice columnist for New York Magazine admitted Thursday that she had been scammed out of $50,000 by a con man who claimed to be a CIA agent.