Your stealing heart: the rise and rise of romance fraud

Photographs by Eliza Bourner

Their conversations quickly developed, mostly by text, but occasionally in darkened video calls in which Chater couldn’t make out Harrison’s features – he explained that the wifi was very poor. His voice sounded oddly high pitched and youthful, in a way that didn’t quite match his persona. She detected a transatlantic quality to his accent and a hint of something else. “He didn’t sound very Scandinavian,” she says.

Though Chater could tell something was not quite right, she ignored her doubts. “My head was saying one thing,” she says, “but my heart was telling me another.” The tension caused her sleepless nights, but she also felt empowered by a sense of adventure. “We were having very sexy conversations,” she says, “and I’d been missing that intimacy.”

At one point, Harrison explained that he was seeking funding for research into brain damage from IEDs, the roadside munitions that had caused so much misery in Somalia. Then he asked Chater if she could help. Initially she said no, but five weeks into the relationship she agreed to send £750, which he advised her to transfer as gift cards.

Detective superintendent Oliver Little of City of London police, which runs Action Fraud, the national reporting service, tells me: “If we are notified early enough by the victim, then we can take action with the banks to get that money stopped. But romance fraud offenders are asking for gift cards such as Apple Pay. As a value transfer mechanism, that’s much harder for us to interrupt.”

Chater did as Harrison instructed. She told shop assistants that the cards were for her grandson, so as to circumvent their warnings of fraud.

“I was lying,” she says.

There was, she admits, a sort of transgressive thrill from the act of pursuing hot emotion while blocking out cold reason. “Obviously, I know that if you haven’t met somebody, you don’t send them money. I sensed something was wrong, but it was exciting.”

When Harrison received the money, he was profusely grateful, but Chater explained that she wouldn’t send any more money unless she met him. He responded by inviting her to Mogadishu to stay at a securely protected UN encampment where he was based. He would arrange the travel – she just needed to send the money for payment for the trip.

Again fired by the buzz of this secret life – she had confided in none of her friends – she transferred a further £200 of a promised £1,200 before her bank intervened and explained that she was the victim of an international fraud.

She immediately stopped responding to Harrison, whose messages became ever more heartfelt and tormented. He told her she had destroyed his world and after four days she “caved in”. “We started talking again,” she says, “and we had more kind of sexy stuff. He'd send me very explicit pictures. And we did this blood oath, too.”

He told her to prick her finger and draw blood, and send a photograph of it to him, which he did in return.

“It was unbelievable but it was all to get me even more deeply involved,” she says.

She tried sending the rest of the £1,200 again, but once more the bank intervened. This time, she had three long conversations with “a wonderful man” at her bank, until she finally accepted she was the victim of a scam.

When she told Harrison it was all over, he said his real name was Christian Gerhard Bøving. This too was another lie. But Bøving does exist. He is a Danish doctor who’d worked in the military. He is also gay and he and his husband have a daughter. Chater learned of him when she Googled his name and discovered that the theft of his identity by fraud gangs was well-documented.

Harrison continued sending messages, begging her not to abandon him, but he didn’t ask for money. Chater believes he may have revealed Bøving’s identity out of guilt, and wished to maintain contact because of the connection they’d established, however false its premise.

It’s also possible that he just wanted to maintain communication in the hope of getting more money down the road. Either way, she didn’t respond.

In this respect, Chater is one of the lucky ones. Last month, five money launderers were convicted at Guildford Crown Court for exploiting as many as 99 victims through romance fraud for a sum amounting to £3.25m. The gang created fake profiles and fictional biographies on dating websites to lure their victims.

The set-up was typical of the crime. As Jane Mitchell, specialist prosecutor for the CPS put it, “The criminals showed complete disregard for their victims, for the sole purpose of exploiting and scamming them out of much needed money. They caused terrible emotional distress to the victims – who were often recently divorced or widowed.”

Most romance fraud is conducted online and the majority of that, says DS Little, originates abroad, either in West Africa or in Southeast Asia, far beyond British legal jurisdiction. (In China the term used for a hybrid of investment and romance fraud is “pig butchering”, in which the victim is fattened up for financial slaughter.) There have been reports of large warehouse-like hubs in Nigeria in which teams of scammers, themselves often controlled and exploited by criminal gangs, work around the clock to extract money from vulnerable westerners. Like actors preparing for a role, they are issued with scripts and background stories. Sometimes they operate side-by-side in rudimentary shacks in which they affect to be in love or to perform phone sex. To thwart the scammers, Big Tech could certainly do more to moderate social media and dating apps, but people value the privacy of their communication and ultimately individuals need to recognise the signs.

Romance fraud is often characterised as a crime aimed at middle-aged women but, as Little notes, while 58% of victims who reported last year to Action Fraud were women, they were spread across age groups from 30 to 79. Male victims made up 42% of reports and three-quarters of them were in the 50 to 79 age group.

The process of being cleaned out by scammers posing as a soul mate can leave the victim feeling humiliated, depressed and sometimes suicidal. Most are too crippled by fear of public judgment to share their experiences. Because fraud is a crime that requires some degree of participation from the victims, particularly in romance fraud, there is a tendency to condemn them as the authors of their own undoing. Little is at pains to say that the police do not stand in judgment. It was when Chater learned of actual suicides from the charity Victim Support, which recently launched a specialist service for romance fraud in Kent and Sussex, that she decided to speak out.

Anna (not her real name), a divorcee in her 50s, could have done with that warning. A few years ago, on the advice of a friend, she tried online dating for the first time. She was a single mother with two children on the threshold of adulthood. Four years earlier she had fled a controlling marriage in the West Indies, returning to England with just £42 in her bank account.

Life had been a struggle and she wanted some respite, ideally some love and affection. She chose the Zoosk app, because she heard it was for mature people looking for longer-term relationships. Her very first response was from a good-looking middle-aged Bulgarian-Scots businessman called Simon.

“He was the softest, most gentle man I'd ever met,” Anna says. “The polar opposite of my ex-husband.”

What’s notable about that description is the word “met”, because over the course of what developed into a two and a half year relationship, in which the couple spoke every day, often multiple times, Anna never spent a second in Simon’s physical presence.

Many people have fallen in love with the wrong person, but for Anna, her first online date was more than a romantic wrong turn. It was a ruthlessly executed scam that saw her hand over a total of £364,000, first gradually and then with increasing frequency.

On the eve of Anna and Simon’s first meeting, the businessman was suddenly called away to France to oversee a shipment of edible oils he was importing. He told Anna he’d return in a few days and continued to bombard her with loving messages. But suddenly the job turned complicated. The port demanded payment to release the goods, Simon told her, and unfortunately he had left home without his credit card. And he didn’t use a smartphone that would enable online banking or video calls. He owned an old Nokia. Simon asked if Anna could help him, so he could rush back. Anna may have wondered what kind of businessman goes away without a credit card, but he showed her manifests and port bills, all itemised and apparently correct. So she sent £1,200.

This was the beginning of a ploy that grew ever more fantastical, like an outrageous TV drama. One crisis after another befell Simon, each necessitating more money. Within five months she had given him an £63,000, but he was still no closer to returning.

Mills believes that there is a fraud for everyone, tailored to their weak points and needs. “If [a scammer] approached me about an investment,” she explains, “I wouldn’t be interested, because it’s not my thing. But maybe if I had a roof in need of repair, they might catch me off guard about that.”

Anna, like Chater, was lonely. Unlike Chater, who’d had a wonderful marriage, she was recovering from the feeling of having been coercively imprisoned in a relationship. Tender words and loving promises meant a lot to her. She spent large parts of her day on the phone with Simon, who insisted he was doing everything possible to get back to her.

“We would cook together on the phone,” she recalls. “We would make love together on the phone. We would pee on the toilet together on the phone. He would sing to me. I have never shared my soul, mind, body and heart in the way I did with Simon.”

It took two and a half years for Anna to free herself from Simon’s hold. In that time she only saw him once on a Skype call, and he didn’t speak, apparently in grief from the death of his daughter, Gwen.

“He was just sitting there on a bed,” she says, suddenly borne back by the memory. “He looked so sad and so beautiful. He just looked at me and turned away, and looked back with a little smile that would make any woman melt.”

Gwen’s long and drawn-out demise was one of the many terrible happenings that took place, along with Simon being kidnapped by murderous loan sharks, and living homeless on the streets of Paris. None of it was real, except to Anna, who chastised herself for not being able to get more money to give to him. She had borrowed from everyone she knew, lying to them about the reasons, spent all the money she had, cleared out her pension, and yet he begged for more.

There’s a reasoning that can take possession of people in this position, says Mills, in which the emotional investment is all mixed up with the money spent. “They start to think, if I continue to be nice to this person, even if this ‘relationship’ doesn’t go anywhere, I’ll get my money back.” Like the gambler who continues betting to win back his losses, the victim is in so deep they can’t see another way out.

One afternoon in her small neat flat in southern England, Anna played me recordings of voice messages Simon had left for her.

“You have to understand that I have made a big promise to you in my life and I will never let you down,” he says. As she struggles to maintain her composure, I immediately notice two things. His accent is not Eastern European, much less Scottish, but is clearly African. And he also sounds as if he’s reading from a script. Anna could hear none of this. And even now his passionate imploring resonates with her. She breaks down and has to excuse herself from the room.

Eventually, Anna was informed by someone on a French Facebook group she’d joined to search for Simon that the image of the man she was looking for belonged to a Mexican soap-opera star. Juan Soler is instantly recognisable in Latin America, but unknown in the UK. The photos and that doctored video came from his Instagram account.

Anna describes the revelation as a life saver. Driven to drink and unable to sleep, she had been struggling with thoughts of suicide. But it wasn’t the end, because she continued to hope that there was some other explanation, while deep-down knowing there could not be. The final straw came when Simon demanded she raise another £10,000 to save his life, and a key detail about a (fictional) friend didn’t make sense. She blocked him, went to Victim Support and reported the crime to Action Fraud.

Although it’s only informed speculation, Anna now believes that she was targeted by Black Axe, a Nigerian mafia that, according to Interpol, is a leading actor in cyber crime, and human and drug trafficking.

In their differing ways, both women have tried to understand what happened to them by speaking about it and neither has succumbed to bitterness or cynicism. Following a decision from the ombudsman, Anna was repaid two thirds of the money she lost by the bank that sanctioned the payments – but all of that, she says, has gone on repaying debts. She tries not to think about her lack of a pension, because it’s too upsetting.

When Chater, who is now in a new relationship, told one of her girlfriends what she’d been through, the friend said she thought Chater was “more intelligent than that. I said, ‘I don’t really think intelligence comes into it,’” she recalls.

“It’s not about intelligence,” Anna agrees. “It just snowballs. You have no idea where £1 will lead.”