How a Scam Nearly Took Everything I Had
He said he loved me. Then he said he needed forty thousand pounds. Then he was gone.
I want to start there because that’s the sentence I’ve been too ashamed to say out loud for almost two years. I’ve said bits of it to my sister. I’ve said even smaller bits to my therapist. I’ve never said the full version to anyone, because the full version has a number in it, and that number is the part that makes people’s faces do the thing I can’t bear. That look. Not unkind, exactly. Just that quiet recalibration where you can see them deciding what kind of person lets that happen to them.
I’ll tell you what kind. The kind who had just turned forty-seven and was eighteen months out of a marriage that had quietly drained her of the belief she was worth anything. The kind who worked long hours at a job she was good at but which left her evenings entirely empty. The kind who downloaded a dating app at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday in November because her flat was too silent and her phone screen was the only warm light in the room.
His name, he told me, was Marcus. He was fifty-two, widowed, an engineer working on an offshore infrastructure project in Singapore. His profile photo was of a man with kind eyes and silver at his temples. He messaged me within twenty minutes of matching.
I know. I know. But I need you to sit inside that Wednesday evening with me for a moment before you know what you know now. Because I didn’t know it then. I just knew that someone was paying attention to me at eleven o’clock at night, and that his first message wasn’t about my appearance. He asked me what I’d been reading lately.
We talked for three weeks before he asked for a phone call. He had an American accent, which surprised me slightly since his profile said he was from Manchester, and when I mentioned it he laughed and said he’d spent so long working abroad that he’d lost his original voice. I believed this because I wanted to and because it was plausible enough and because by that point I was already learning the shape of him, or the shape I thought was him, and it was a shape I found myself moving toward.
He was thoughtful in the particular way that is very difficult to manufacture if you’ve never been thoughtful. He remembered things. He’d ask about my mother’s health two days after I’d mentioned she had a hospital appointment. He sent voice notes walking to a meeting, just a minute long, just telling me what the morning looked like from where he was. I still have one of them on my phone. I should delete it. I keep not deleting it.
By the eighth week, the word love had appeared.
He said it first. I remember I was standing at my kitchen window washing up, and my phone was propped against the tap, and I read it and I put the phone face-down on the counter and stood there looking at the water running. Then I picked it up and I typed it back.
After that it moved fast. Not in a way I noticed as fast. It moved at the speed of something that felt inevitable. We talked about what it would be like when his contract ended in March. He’d come to London. We’d take a few days somewhere quiet. He knew a place on the coast in Cornwall he’d always wanted to go. I added that to my list of things to look forward to. I had a small list by then. He was most of it.
The first ask came on a Sunday afternoon in January.
He explained it carefully, which is how I know someone practised it. There was a problem with a payment to his subcontractors. The company’s international transfer system was frozen pending a regulatory audit. It would resolve itself, probably within two weeks, but in the meantime his crew hadn’t been paid and he was personally liable and there was a sum of six thousand pounds he needed to bridge the gap. He’d pay it back within three weeks. He was embarrassed to ask. He almost hadn’t.
I transferred the money the next morning.
The second ask came five weeks later. Twelve thousand. A different problem, same architecture. I transferred that one too. I told myself it was because I trusted him and because twelve thousand pounds was a lot but not impossible for me, and because people who are in love help each other. That’s what love is. I’d looked it up, in a way, in the years of my marriage where I’d wanted it and not had it. Love was this. Being useful to someone.
The third ask was for twenty-two thousand pounds.
By then I had started to feel something I didn’t have a name for. Not suspicion exactly. More like the feeling you get when you’re very tired but keep telling yourself you’re fine. A sort of friction at the edges of things. I messaged a friend called Suki, not explaining fully, just saying I was helping someone with money and was that strange and she said it depended and I said yes and she said that’s a lot of money, love. And I’d known it was but I’d needed to hear someone else say it.
I sent twenty thousand of the twenty-two he’d asked for.
I want to tell you there was a dramatic moment. A caught lie. A slip in his story that cracked the whole thing open at once. There wasn’t. What happened was slower and more ordinary. He stopped responding to voice notes. He started taking longer to reply. The messages got slightly shorter. I told myself he was stressed. I told myself this was just what it was like when someone was dealing with professional pressure. I told myself a lot of things. I was very busy telling myself things.
The final message from him came on a Wednesday. Again a Wednesday. It said there was a family emergency and he’d be out of contact for a few days. I replied. I replied again three days later. I replied one more time a week after that. After that I stopped replying because the reply I was sending had started to feel like something I was doing to punish myself.
I found the forum on my fourth night of not sleeping properly. There’s a website where people post about romance fraud. Some of them have been through exactly this. Some of them have lost more. Some of them have lost everything, houses, pensions, retirement savings. I am not the worst case on that forum by a significant distance, which should have made me feel better and only made me feel worse, because it meant the scale of it was larger than I’d let myself imagine and that I was one of many and that the man with the kind eyes and the silver temples and the voice note from Singapore was not a person at all, or not the person I’d thought, but something that had been constructed carefully out of exactly the things I’d needed and then dismantled once it had taken what it came for.
I sat on my kitchen floor for a long time that night.
I didn’t tell anyone for three months. I went to work. I answered emails. I had conversations in which I said things and people said things back and none of it touched anything real. I felt like a building that looks fine from the street but has had all its wiring pulled out.
The thing nobody tells you about being scammed is that the grief isn’t only about the money. The money is real and the loss of it is real and I won’t minimise that because it took me years to save and I’m starting again and some days that is genuinely frightening. But the grief that kept me on my kitchen floor at two in the morning wasn’t about the money. It was about the Wednesday in November. The reading question. The voice notes. The word love typed at my kitchen window. None of that was real. All of it felt real. I don’t know how to hold both of those things at once without something in me giving way a little.
My sister found out in April. I hadn’t told her. She found out because I was sitting at her kitchen table for Sunday dinner and she asked how things were going and something in my face did something I hadn’t planned, and she put her fork down very carefully and said, something’s happened.
I told her. All of it. The number and everything.
She didn’t do the face. She got up, came round to my side of the table, and sat down next to me and put her hand over mine and didn’t say anything for quite a long time. That silence is possibly the most useful thing anyone has done for me since this happened.
I reported it to Action Fraud. I don’t have high expectations of that. The people who do this are often untraceable, or based in places where jurisdiction makes pursuit close to impossible. I reported it because I needed to do something and because every report adds to a picture and because the woman on the forum who lost her house told me to report it even if nothing comes of it, so I did.
I joined a support group. Online, about twenty people, people from all over the country who’d been through variations of the same thing. I am not someone who joins support groups. I am someone who thinks she can manage things alone. I’m working on that.
Some things are different now in ways I didn’t expect. I am more careful, obviously, but that’s not the most significant change. The most significant change is that I’ve stopped treating my own loneliness as evidence that something is wrong with me. That Wednesday in November, what I was really doing was acting on the belief that needing connection was a weakness I had to satisfy in secret, quickly, before anyone noticed I had it. Someone noticed I had it. They used it.
So now I talk about it. Not to everyone. But to the people who matter.
I still have the voice note. I keep thinking the reason I can’t delete it is shame, but I don’t think that’s quite it anymore. I think it’s because it sounds like kindness and I don’t want to forget what kindness sounds like, even a copy of it. Even the forgery.
The forty thousand pounds is gone and I am still here.
That’s the sentence I say to myself on the bad mornings. Not triumphant. Just accurate.
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