ONLINE DATING RELATIONSHIP ENDS BADLY, LOST TOTAL SUM OF $1.3M

Canadians looking for love online are falling prey to the country’s most lucrative scam. Ellen, now 65, whose true identity is being protected, says she lost $1.3 million after she began sending money to "Dave," whom she had met on a dating site. Ellen was retired, living a comfortable life in a nice home in British Columbia. In the driveway was a luxury car, and her house was paid for. And then she joined an online dating site, hoping to find some companionship. Instead of romance, Ellen says she lost her life savings, and more over $1.3 million seemingly taken by an online scam where villains prey on people looking for their perfect partner.

Ellen, victim of $1.3 million on-line scam

Ellen’s is a story that is hard to believe, and even more difficult to comprehend. How could a mature, self-sufficient woman send such a huge sum of money to someone she never even met? She reported the loss to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, and is now their biggest recorded victim of so-called romance fraud a new take on the Nigerian email scam. Romance frauds are the most lucrative scam in Canada. Over the past four years, Canadians have reported losses of almost $50 million to authorities. And the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre thinks only a small percentage of victims tell anyone what happened to them. Behind the flowery words and promises of love, an investigation by CTV’s W5 and the Star has discovered, are criminal gangs, many in West Africa, running dozens of cons at once.

“What we are dealing with is organized crime,” says Daniel Williams of the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. “No one is doing this to one person. For the one person that contacts us about it, there are 15 who have not, and 30 who will be scammed in future.”

Ellen, now 65, says there is nothing left. It is a complicated tale, which she traces back to October 2010, when a girlfriend urged her to try online dating. Why not thought Ellen, even though she had previously dipped her toe in the pool of men online, and found them wanting.  She was single; her kids were grown and had lives of their own. So Ellen who agreed to speak to the Star only on condition of anonymity says she signed up to Match.com. “I thought it would be fun just to banter back and forth with somebody,” she says. The man she says she met online called himself Dave Field. His picture was that of a somewhat handsome, balding middle-aged man. As Ellen and “Dave” chatted online and occasionally on the phone, she says she told her he was of Swedish descent and was living in Los Angeles.  His accent was a bit off, she thought, but still. Ellen says she was intrigued. Since Los Angeles is not far from B.C. So Ellen approached the idea of meeting up, and “Dave” seemed keen.  “I said, ‘If there was no chance of you coming to Canada, I will come to L.A.,’ ” she recalls. “He did not balk at that.”  But when she booked her ticket, she says, things changed. He was busy. He had appointments. She cancelled the reservation. A few weeks later, she tried again. Again, he dodged her.  “So I just put it on the line and said, ‘What is up with this? Why are we playing games?’ ” Ellen recalls. “He said, ‘It is not a game.’ And what was the excuse? He was trying to unravel his father’s estate.”

That is when it appears the scam began in earnest. Ellen says “Dave” told her he had been left a sizeable inheritance offshore, but because of a lawyer’s incompetence, he had to clear some debts before he could sell the assets.

“I am of the nature that I would help anybody,” Ellen says. “I do not like the idea of not being able to help somebody if I can.” Emails from “Dave” to Ellen, which she provided to the Star, use endearments like; “baby,” “honey” and “sweetheart,” and end with “hugs, kisses and love.” Ellen says she was not head-over-heels for him which would make her different from many other victims of romance scams and by the end of the con; she just wanted her money back. She says she tried to send the first sum of $945 via Western Union, but the employee refused: “She said to me, ‘Do you know this person? If you don’t know this person, don’t send it. I’m not sending it.’ ”

Ellen found another way: by MoneyGram. Eventually, she says, “Dave” would give her bank account numbers and she would wire him or people purporting to act for him wire transfers for tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, at a time. (Documentation provided by Ellen shows transfers of roughly $1.3 million, in U.S. dollars, euros and British pounds.)

It appears the cash flowed out of Ellen’s investment account and into accounts in Hong Kong, Greece, Singapore and directly to Lagos, Nigeria. She says she travelled to London and Madrid to meet people who “Dave” said would get her money back and each time came home with a diminished bank balance. Ellen says she sent the first few thousand to help “Dave” out and the rest followed as an attempt to get back the money she had lost. “It was, ‘You have already sent me this money how am I supposed to pay you back if we do not go to the next step?’ ” Ellen says he told her. “And at one point I said, ‘If this keeps up, I am going to be bankrupt.’ ”

Even Ellen is at a loss to explain how an adult, who says she had accumulated a tidy nest egg by growing an inheritance through canny property purchases, could be taken in by the fraudsters. “It is like I was living in a fog,” Ellen says. “I just felt as though I was in a fog, for months and months on end.” Ellen says her fog lifted when a male relative told her point-blank that she was being conned. She ultimately reported a loss of $1.332 million to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, which compiles information and forwards it to law enforcement for investigation.

They referred her case to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in B.C. Authorities there are unable to confirm what happened to that complaint. People familiar with romance frauds say that it is generally not one person running a scam so someone like “Dave” was probably several different people. (“When we hear consumers say, ‘he’ or ‘she,’ we say it is not a man. It’s not a woman,” Williams says. “It’s a dozen people working the keyboard.”) Many romance frauds end before the losses run as high as Ellen says hers was, but that does not mean they are less significant, and not just in financial terms. Because the victims believe they are in a real relationship, they have not just lost their money: they have also lost a boyfriend or girlfriend, and the future that person had promised them.

 “Never make a payment. Never!! That first payment is the hook,” she says. “I wish I could shake people.”

By: Jennifer Quinn News reporter, Robert Cribb Foreign.