Fairfield woman swindled in bogus call for help

“Grandma, it’s me.”

That’s how, Fairfield police say, the call began.

An elderly woman in the Holland Hill section of Fairfield received a call Friday morning from a man, purporting to be her grandson. He informed her he had gone to Toronto with friends. They got into some trouble, and well, he was sitting in a Canadian jail in need of bail. The grandson begged her not to tell his parents.

At that point, the grandson handed the phone over to an “officer that explained the grandson needed $2,136 to make bail,” Fairfield Police Sgt. James Perez said Saturday.

“The the so-called officer instructed the grandmother to wire the money [through] Western Union.”

The woman contacted one of her children who works at Sikorsky Aircraft and asked him to wire the funds, which he did at 2 p.m. Friday. Two hours later, the son received a call from someone claiming to be a Canadian attorney requesting additional money, this time for providing legal representation to the grandson.

When a family member’s well being is in jeopardy, Perez notes, it’s understandable that grandparents will want to help. But before they open their wallets, he says, they should confirm the true whereabouts of their relatives through other family members.

Furthermore, once money is wired internationally and received at the other end by someone, it is impossible to recoup the money because the wire transfer services do not demand the recipients show any identification.

Connecticut residents reported 2,278 fraud complaints during 2008, the last year statistics are available from the Internet Crime Complaint Center, that cost them a total of $2.1 million.

Six percent of those cases in which consumers were fleeced involved confidence games in which 31 percent of the victims were bilked out of between $1,000 and $4,000. The median dollar loss from all complaints was $695.45 and the top scam involved a Nigerian letter fraud in which the victim lost $135,000.

No love on dating site

A Christchurch woman says she feels “violated” after being targeted by an online love rat.

The fraudster, purporting to be a Swedish-born engineer by the name of Donald Andrews, corresponded daily with mother-of-three Michelle Summers, 46, for three weeks before he asked her for money.

The pair exchanged personal details through emails, photographs, phone calls, and “Andrews” even faked a plane ticket receipt to make it look like he was flying to New Zealand.

Their last contact was when the man asked the woman for $6750 after a business deal turned sour.

“It was pretty heartbreaking. [After three weeks] I believed him,” she said. “I thought he was genuine. I thought I had met my match.”

She met the man through internet dating site Match.com. He immediately started communicating by private email.

“Andrews” wrote long letters.

“Personal hygiene is very important to me as I love to smell good for that special woman,” he wrote. “I also enjoy giving that special woman a soothing massage, especially after a hard day as it is truly a stress reliever. I believe it’s nice to comb a woman’s hair now and then as well.”

As the relationship developed, the emails turned passionate.

“I want to grow old with you. I want to experience this crazy love for ever and ever,” he wrote.

The later emails described an increasingly tense “Andrews” on a difficult and stressful engineering job in Lagos, Nigeria, preparing to travel to Christchurch with his daughter.

On January 14, days before flying to New Zealand, he emailed, saying he could not cash the cheque he had been paid for his work and that he needed a loan to prevent him being delayed on the project.

“Baby it’s just 6750nzd. I have no-one else to turn to right now. I don’t want to miss my flight for any reason.”

Summers said she knew it was a scam as soon as she read it, but there was the nagging thought of, “What if it’s true?”

She and the man spoke on the phone, and when it became evident no money was forthcoming, he hung up.

Summers said she felt “sick” and violated because she had told him “some quite personal things”.

“I’ve got a friend on there [Match.com] and she probably would have given him the money because she’s so desperately lonely.”

Sean Lyons, of internet watchdog Netsafe, said romance scams were a highly developed form of the Nigerian lottery scam.

The hardest part for scammers was finding suitable marks, but a dating site had hundreds of people open to meeting people.

Lyons said victims felt personally violated but they should know they were probably not even dealing with a single person.

It was more likely they were an “account” being worked by a kind of call centre somewhere in the world.

“It’s not a con artist, it’s a business,” he said.

Woman conned out of £132,000 in dating scam

Woman conned out of £132,000 in dating scam

By CLARE SEMKE
Crime Reporter
A LONELY woman looking for love was cheated out of £132,000 in a devious internet dating scam.
The conman who wooed the victim on oldflirts.co.uk claimed to be a dashing American who was living in Malaysia but wanted to return to the UK.

But he turned out to be a cruel trickster who conned the victim, from Portsmouth – who has not been named by police – out of her lifesavings.

After about a month he asked the woman, in her 50s, for money, saying he didn’t have access to his bank accounts and needed £3,000.

He made further requests – saying he needed help to get out of the country, and on another occasion asking for money for ‘basic travel allowances’.

The fraudster also claimed he had £2.5m he wanted to bring into the UK, but needed help from his victim to clear the funds.

He even said he had kidney failure and needed cash for a transplant.

The victim made more than 10 payments through money transfer firm Western Union in an eight-month period.

Detective Constable Pete Spake said: ‘He was very flattering and attentive to her needs. Within about a month of the first contact he started asking for money. He said he was working in Malaysia and didn’t have access to his bank accounts.

‘He said he was being threatened with prison because he had been forced by his boss to carry out some criminal activity and was trapped. Then he said he had £2.5m and he wanted to bring it into the UK but needed help clearing the funds.

‘They kept coming up with more expenses that were needed to clear this money to the UK which she duly paid. He then said he needed kidney failure and needed surgery.

‘She is very distressed. It was everything she had. She’s broke.’ She’s not the first victim in our area to lose cash while looking for love over the internet.

Postie Shane Symington from Portsmouth was cheated out of £130,000 by Nigerian internet fraudsters posing as a beautiful model. Now Det Con Spake is urging internet daters to be on their guard.

‘My advice to anyone is don’t send money to someone you have met over the internet,’ he said.

‘If it appears too good to be true, it normally is.’