A Yeovil woman has spoken for the first time about how she was ‘romance scammed’ by a man allegedly posing as an Armed Forces soldier from the US who subjected her to a campaign of abuse.
Instances of romance fraud, which involves scamming a person out of money by pretending to want a relationship, reportedly rose during lockdown.
£68million was lost to such scams in 2020 according to Action Fraud, with the average loss per victim reported to UK Finance at £7,850.
Read more: ‘He screamed at me from his car’: Street harassment in a Somerset town
The Yeovil resident says she has been left thousands of pounds in debt and without a job after she left her previous position amid repeated assurances that they would be imminently moving to the US together.
Lisa Lailey had recently separated from her previous partner, with whom she has two children, when she first met the man she now says romance scammed her out of around £40,000.
The man, who will be referred to as John Doe for the purposes of this article, allegedly told Ms Lailey he was in the process of getting a divorce when he first met her in 2015.
In what she described as “the first part of the fraud”, Ms Lailey, who is a capable painter, initially agreed to do a series of military aircraft canvases for Mr Doe, after he told her his colleagues would pay handsomely for such artwork.
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Once the canvases were completed, Ms Lailey said he asked for funds to transport the paintings to be sold at an art exhibition in the American Embassy.
Ms Lailey gave him around £5,000 and said that when nothing later came of it, part of her then wondered whether she was being scammed.
Yet she said when she confronted him, he “went mad” and insisted he had done all he could to secure sales for her, but had been “mucked around by work colleagues”.
Ms Lailey said: “I so stupidly believed him. I lost money, but he seemed so genuine, so our friendship continued.”
Their relationship became romantic and Mr Doe moved in with Ms Lailey, her teenage daughter and her son years later in 2018, which is when she says the abuse began.
The relationship between Mr Doe and Ms Lailey’s 17-year-old daughter became increasingly damaging, so much so that she moved out four months after his arrival.
As became a common mechanism of the alleged abuse, Mr Doe used his supposed job in the military to distort Ms Lailey’s sense of reality; in this instance saying that their technology was monitored and her daughter had criticised her in a series of messages to her family members.
When Ms Lailey’s daughter left home, Mr Doe allegedly prevented them from having further contact and Ms Lailey says she did not see her for two and a half years.
Thus began a process in which Mr Doe isolated Ms Lailey from everyone with the exception of her mother; she stopped using all social media and drifted from family and friends.
“He cut everyone out of my life,” she said. “The only reality I had was what he put around me.”
Ms Lailey’s son eventually also moved out of the house last September, after studying for his GCSE exams had become disrupted by Mr Doe’s alleged insistence he learn the US system of education instead.
Ms Lailey said she accepted a wedding proposal from Mr Doe and the pair began to make plans for a new life in America, where he assured her he had a role on the Anti-Terrorism Task Force lined up, which would only require the completion of a two-year training programme in the UK.
She said: “I had this illusion that me, my two kids and him were all going to move to America to have this wonderful life. He made all these promises and I believed it.”
During this two-year period, Mr Doe allegedly said that the Armed Forces would only provide bed and board upfront on the base, with the prospect of their expenses being reimbursed at a later date.
Ms Lailey said she filled in expense forms for the water, electricity, food and transport costs she had incurred during the two-year period, noting that Mr Doe did not pay for anything.
At the same time, Ms Lailey said he claimed to have been stung by the Internal Revenue Service, which is responsible for collecting taxes in the US. He allegedly told her he had to make monthly payments or risk being deported and imprisoned in the US, so Ms Lailey gave him funds to contribute to this.
Mr Doe would disappear for stints at a military base, where he said he worked dangerous life-threatening jobs, before which he would call Ms Lailey to say goodbye, sometimes 40 times a day.
She said: “He thought he was going to die, so I always felt I needed to answer. When you believe someone you love is in a life and death job, that becomes the priority.
“I would be so scared – I didn’t want him doing that work. I filled in next of kin forms, and he’d say, if something happens to me, make sure my body goes back to America with my brothers.”
As the two years drew to a close, Ms Lailey had quit her job in retail and sold her car and furniture in anticipation of their move to the US.
However, Mr Doe at first said this was delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic and then because of his work at a base in the UK.
“He said it didn’t matter about all the debts, because the expenses from his work will pay,” Ms Lailey said, “so I kept whacking everything on my credit card, because I thought he would sort it out. Then it just kept getting delayed and delayed.”
Ms Lailey said their relationship became increasingly abusive amid the pandemic and they would often have all-night rows which resulted in Ms Lailey being “on edge all the time, so afraid something would upset him”.
She said during that period they would be intimate five to eight times a day and that if she showed “any reluctance”, particularly given that she suffers from back problems, he would become aggressive.
“The anger was so bad I would just do anything to avoid it,” she said. “It didn’t matter if my back was hurting. He would just expect it and it nearly killed me.
“I knew it wasn’t right, but I put it down to the fact he was doing such a dangerous job. In the end, I was having so many panic attacks and when you get to that stage, you will do anything to avoid feeling like that.”
Ms Lailey described the “double edged sword” of how Mr Doe would bring on her panic attacks but then become her “saviour” when he helped her to cope with them.
She said: “You don’t want to end the relationship, you want to end the abuse. You have elements of the relationship that are really good and you feel like they love you and then you have the other side of the coin, which is the abuse.”
Towards the end of their relationship, Mr Doe was allegedly nudging Ms Lailey to write her children out of her will while insisting she not leave anything to him, in a move she described as reverse psychology.
Ms Lailey said that by this stage she was desperately missing her children, who she said Mr Doe had deemed to be a “security threat” to his job.
“I’d got to the point where I knew if I stayed with him any longer, I was going to have a heart attack,” she said.
“My legs would tremble most of the time, living under such severe stress. It was horrendous.”
The “turning point” came in March of this year, when Ms Lailey insisted she see her daughter and then ended their relationship the following month.
Ms Lailey said that when their relationship ended, the abuse had become so severe she was having panic attacks nearly every day.
By that point, the repayments on her credit card were outstripping the money she had, forcing her to live off porridge for the last couple of months. She said the last port of call if the status quo had continued would have been to sell her house.
It was only after their relationship had disintegrated and Mr Doe had moved out that Ms Lailey said she discovered his identity as a member of the Armed Forces was a fraud.
Ms Lailey said he told her he had served four tours in Iraq and had not been to Afghanistan, however searches online found that photographs of soldiers he treasured and would emotionally claim to be his friends that had lost their lives during the war, were in fact featured in national news stories about Afghanistan.
She said: “He told me they were his dead marine buddies in these awful stories of how he saw his mates die.
“When I saw those images online, I knew then that he was a fraud. He had obviously just printed those off and then portrayed them as his own.”
Ms Lailey subsequently sought out an IUD survivor who Mr Doe claimed had interviewed him at a base and worked with him, only for the man to say he knew Mr Doe locally, as opposed to through the Armed Forces.
Ms Lailey has since taken stock of her finances and calculated she gave Mr Doe around £40,000 over the course of their relationship, which she does not believe she will ever be able to recoup.
She said: “I never suspected that he was a fraud ever. I absolutely believed what he told me and I fell in love with him. I believed he was my soul mate.
“This man who could be so awful to me would always tell me that he couldn’t live without me, always tell me that I was his saviour, that I stopped all his nightmares – from very early on he made me feel like I had his life in my hands, so I felt responsible for him.”
Ms Lailey described the level of manipulation and the extent of the lies as “horrendous” and “absolutely evil”.
She said: “If he told me in the beginning he didn’t have any money and he didn’t have a job, I loved him anyway. How can you be with someone and do this to them?”
Ms Lailey reported the alleged romance scam to both Avon and Somerset Police and Dorset Police, as well as Action Fraud, however the chances of prosecution appear to be slim.
She said she was advised to take out a non-molestation order against Mr Doe in May, which is in place for a year.
The psychological damage this ordeal has wrought upon Ms Lailey is palpable, and yet her driving aim now is to raise awareness so other women do not suffer similar abuse.
She said: “He got me away from my kids, which destroyed me. He completely financially wrecked me in every way possible.
“I’m unable to work because I’ve got a torn shoulder injury. I’ve also got massive anxiety problems and I’ve got £19,000 in debt on several credit cards.”
Avon and Somerset Police confirmed an investigation was conducted after Ms Lailey reported the fraud earlier this year.
A spokesperson for the force said: “At this time no offence(s) have been identified, subject to further evidence being presented.
“The person who reported the matter to us was offered support and advice by officers to help going forward.”
Ms Lailey additionally reported the matter to Action Fraud, who confirmed it was assessed by the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau at the City of London Police but has not been passed to a police force for investigation.
A spokesperson for Action Fraud said: “With well over 850,000 reports coming into the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau each year, not all cases can be passed on for further investigation.
“Reports are assessed based on a number of factors. One factor that is taken into consideration is the amount lost, however, the reports most likely to present an investigative opportunity for forces, or where a crime is ongoing, and those that present the greatest threat and harm to the victim or victims concerned, are the ones that are prioritised for onward dissemination. A letter has been sent to the victim to inform them.”
Ms Lailey concluded: “I just feel so helpless that this has happened to me, and he is not facing any justice.
“This is too massive for me to take on board. I don’t know what to do with it all. Every day is just going over all this in my head. I don’t really think I’ll ever be right again after this.”
Do you have a story to tell? Email me through rebecca.cook@reachplc.com to get in touch.
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