Author: Anna Rowe

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Quick Lessons – Using Fake Military Profiles

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Military Scams

Classic scammer preference.
  • Military men are seen as saviours. Good, trustworthy men.
  • Working in another country on tour gives perfect cover for a scammer to not be able to phone or video call ‘for security’ reasons. It’s a dangerous job which gives opportunity to create emotional stories to real you in and hook you.
  • Real military men DO NOT set up social media profiles to chat with women or men. They will never ask for money.
Look at these pictures for clues of scammers.
YELLOW : Using an officers name and /or pictures.
RED : Look for key words-honest/simple/god fearing/divorced/widowed
GREEN : Grammar-there will mistakes. English is poor.
BLUE : Follower/Following is often very different. Following from the account is on mass to attract followers.

 

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Quick Lessons – Reverse Image Search

Reverse Image Searches

This profile is fake. It’s easy to do a reverse image search which sometimes shows you who the real pictures belong to.

Not every picture on the profile may give results so it’s best to try a few.
These pictures show the process to discover who the pictures have been stolen from.
Reverse image search apps and platforms include:
Yandex
Google image search
Tineye
Bing
If you don’t get results from one then try another. The platforms use different search parameters for the images
                 
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Quick Lessons – Financial Scammer Catfish Red Flags

Financial Scammer Catfish

Red Flags
  1. They don’t want to voice call as you will hear their accent and bad English. There are exceptions and these are French speaking Africans from the Ivory Coast. They pose as Europeans and also use the children to talk to victims.
  2. They don’t want to video call. There are exceptions and this will usually be a recorded video which they have stolen with the pictures. They will play it to the camera and claim bad internet connection when they can’t answer questions.
  3. English will be poor and broken. You will see mistakes in grammar and sentence structure. It will seem ‘off’.
  4. All scammers have a sob story. This gives them opportunity to gain your sympathy and build a bond. They will also have many troubles they need your help with.
  5. They will often claim to be military, doctors or some other trust worthy profession. They will also claim to be working out of their home country. Key words on profiles will be honest, trustworthy, loyal, caring, looking for love, widowed, divorced, God fearing.
  6. Photos may have been photoshopped to hold your name as ‘proof’ it’s them. Also, but not always, the photos they have stolen may appear in reverse image searches. There are lots of free apps or platforms to do this. Google image search and Yandex are some of the best.
  7. After building your trust, they will test the water by asking for either a small sum of money or i tunes cards etc. Larger sums of money can follow as well as requesting phones and SIM cards.

 

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Quick Lessons – Types of Catfish

Types of Catfish

Financial
-Romance fraud. The most common tactic of financial scammers. Creating an online romance for the purpose of extorting money.
-Sextortion. Creating an online romance to extort intimate images or videos for the purpose of blackmailing the victim. These images can also be used to trick other victims into sharing their own.
-Marriage fraud. Initiated online through social media and/or dating platforms. These scammers look for the biggest end game of marriage, visas, and every other benefit that comes with it.
Personal
-Some catfish have terrible self esteem issues and find it easier to communicate with others though a fake identity.
-Revenge by tricking an ex or someone they hold a grudge against into a relationship to cause hurt and embarrassment.
-Jokes. This can seem like a good joke but can have dire consequences.
-Cybersex. Some men who would ordinarily be voyeurs in public places, choose to engage in collecting images from victims online by creating trust and the exploiting them. No money is involved here, just sexual gratification for the perpetrator and humiliation for the victim.
-Offline Personal Catfish initiate the relationship online, creating trust and then come offline to meet in person, continuing the deception through their fake identity.
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We crossed paths in a support group. J’s experience of a Catfish.

This email arrived from ‘J’ before Christmas. It had me in tears and her words stayed with me all day. This eloquent and heart felt account of the reality of victims of Catfish tells of the emotion spinning manipulations endured at their hands. Thank you so much for sharing this J. It will help others so much knowing their feelings are not unusual.

I sought first to understand with an open mind, wanting to believe the best in you. Wanting to believe the picture you still paint for me.

But I also read and heard one story after the next, about men and women who have been devastated by online fraudsters.

And the ones about love-bombing catfish, who devise scams for money, really hit hard for me.

Many of those victims I learned from have spent years searching their scammers alias online, as they try to move through the impact their predator had on their lives.

But I simply can’t do this.

I am already exhausted.

There is no justice in a world where you pretend nothing happened, while I wait for you to admit that it did. It’s time to move on for me.

This is my letter of truth. One that I hope will also demonstrate to other men and women who have been through the emotional abuse of being deceived and exploited for someone else’s gain that, just because their offender will not admit what they have done, and just because they believed the lies they were fed, does not mean one has to forever question their reality or live with this alone. We are not losing our minds: gaslighting is a real manipulation that can fool anyone. It can make you distrust your own instincts.

I wish I could just walk away and say I should choose who I let into my life better, but your ruthlessly calculated and deceptive pursuit of me, and effort you go about hiding all of it mean you must start behaving better.

I get that the worldwide web and social media remain poorly regulated, but that doesn’t give me or anyone else permission to find ways to exploit that.

And this is certainly not how I wanted to handle my closure, an honest and fully detailed apology from you would have sufficed while I waited for you to repay me. The fact that you are intelligent enough to operate at the level you already do offers plenty indication and hope you could succeed at other opportunities for scratch, it makes me wonder if you’ve ever heard the saying “an honest days work for an honest days pay”.

I know now there are others like me at varying degrees, who I would never ask to take up the task of being so loud at hand towards you.
It is precisely the attempts to downplay what I tried to confront, convince me I am wrong which brings me to this letter. I am writing factual truths here, and will accept any legal ramifications that would result from what I have said in this letter.

This is not the type of writing someone in the throes of “psychosis” or loss of sanity would create. People don’t just run down their hall and throw up upon learning the truth about their relationship with someone. This is real.

We crossed paths in a support group. Intended to be a safe place for communicating about the moments or events people struggle with in their lives. Now I know support groups have become places for catfish or other fraudsters to take advantage of vulnerability. To hear of someone’s most intimate struggles, while at the same time knowingly inflicting more pain onto them… for money.

There is not one decent excuse for that.

And yet, you have used my struggles as a weapon against me, exploited them as a solid “pray for her” she is crazy out of her mind backstory. But I care more about preventing women from being fed through your grinder, than I do what they think of my sanity. At the end of the day I have helped others avoid being tangled up before they could thank me. Even one beautiful, trusting and caring soul left feeling confused and alone with a smaller bank account is too many.

It was upon learning the version you tell, as to why I was reaching out to women, that I finally realised you are still working harder at keeping these secrets hidden than you are at finding an honest way to rebuild.

Kind, nice people treat others as they would like to be treated. They do not make up having the same interests, or fabricate information about themselves in order to get women to think you are like-minded persons for selfish reasons. They don’t pretend they are unmarried while just returning back from their honeymoon.

You had a preface to your game: do not be resentful or spiteful. Never lie to you. Don’t fight with you and don’t hurt you. Many of the rules were broken from day 1 while you had already waged an undeclared war on my human psyche. But now we talk about repentance and forgiveness because it is convenient. My actions to those I have hurt, who deserved better, is what it means to make things right. Not words.

Before I learned there were others, while my reality was based on your reactions, it was hard to believe my recount of events… of things I heard and felt and saw with my very own eyes. So I’m being serious when I say excuse me in advance if not everyone who reads this has encountered you at this level. But I know what happened to me. And I had to investigate and fight so hard to uncover what I knew was true but was told by you I was inaccurate about. Down to scientific facts.

At best, you made a very premeditated effort to deceive and manipulate a woman capable of offering money to you. At best, you made a joke out of my hopes and dreams and personality. Maybe you thought that a Scarlet letter would shame me from reaching this point. I am not ashamed of being human with emotions, and at the time, a profound naivety that led me where I am.
I like to think you have chosen a temporary deplorable career path. But that doesn’t change the reality that I type this as one of your victims, and there’s no more time left in me for silence. What looks to you as harassment and stalking is a victim desperately searching for answers. Trying to take back their human dignity in knowing that this was never about them.

One of the more harsh and impactful damages that result from being victim of an online romance fraud is this perceived loss in the value of humanity. A sense of isolation, fear, shame and humiliation all at once, in moments where it used to seem intuitive to open up to other people. Now there’s an incessant nagging level of self-doubt…that I will miss some sign of a predator in disguise and my naivety or poor judgement will cause me to regret an introduction to a new face. There’s this need to recover without the closure to begin.

Until today.

But then again maybe God has put it on my heart to stop you from this… and to help others do the same, should they find themselves duped by a con artist who thinks they can do and say anything to exploit what they want in life. – J

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M’s Story of a Romance Scam

It’s always a privilege to be able to publish someone else’s experience of Romance Fraud  on my website. Today, Mike has been brave in sharing his experience of a financial romance scam. Sharing these stories is incredibly important to potentially allow another targets or victims to recognise what they or someone they know are going through too.

I retired and moved to Jacksonville, FL during the summer of 2016.  I didn’t know anyone so I joined a dating site. I was arrogant, naive, gullible, and ignorant of online dating scams.

​I joined Arrangement Finders in hope of meeting a beautiful younger woman who wanted an older man.  Scrolling through the posts, I came upon an extremely beautiful woman with a rather conservative photo.  Her post read that she lived in Starke, FL not far from Jax. Her name was “Luisa Rosario” and had moved to Semmes, AL to live with her “sister”, “Joyce Patterson”.

The scammer was using pictures of Mexican-American glamour model Olga Loera.

We struck up an online relationship and she gave me her email address, RosarioLuisa955@gmail.com. She said she wanted to come to Jax to meet me, but needed my help and asked for money.  Stupidly, I started sending her $50 here and there.  She insisted on Gift Cards as she could not cash a check, etc. We texted everyday and she kept saying she was through with young men and wanted me because I was mature, kind and decent.

​Next, she “moved” to Buffalo, NY with her “uncle”, ‘Omar Velez” and asked me to wire him money via Western Union.  Again, foolishly, I did.  He got her a cell phone with a number from St. John’s, Newfoundland in Canada.  She offered some vague explanations about saving money.

​I once talked with some man claiming to be Omar who lied that he was happy for Luisa and me. I fell deeper into this scam.  We even started proclaiming “love” for one another and made plans to live together in Florida.

​“Luisa” moved in with her girlfriend, “Becca”, sent me a phoney address in Buffalo and showed a phoney New York State driver’s license. “Becca” and I spoke a few times and “Luisa” sent me many “her” photos of a drop dead gorgeous Mexican woman, face shots, sexy poses and even nudes. When I asked why one so stunningly beautiful would want to be with a retired, average guy like me; she lied about my being her soul mate, etc.

​For three years she ran this scam, conning me with lies and deception.  I sent her money along the way and we texted or emailed every day.  Supposedly, she was so broke, she couldn’t afford to get to work, had little or no food and tried guilting me into sending more money saying I was cruel to “let her suffer so.”

I even bought a plane ticket to fly to Buffalo on 6/1/20018 to move into “our apt.” that she had secured with my deposit and rent.  But at the last second, she texted me that “her sister Joyce” was dying in Las Vegas.  Then fake “Luisa” later lied that she had been scammed by the landlord and lost the apt. and all my cash. Another lie.

Eventually, I Reverse Image searched a lovely face shot she had just sent, and was revealed it was Olga Loera, a former Mexican Playmate of The Year and an incredibly beautiful glamour model and celebrity in Los Angeles. Olga and I have texted and she is a real, decent, gorgeous model and mother of two,

Luisa Rosario, who doesn’t exist, used Olga’s photos for three years to lie, steal and Catfish me.  I have confronted whomever is behind the long con, and they admitted it.  You can see “Luisa Rosario” on a fake Facebook page, but it is actually a pic of the lovely Olga on a TV Show from seven years ago.

I have learned so much in the past two weeks, so be careful folks!

Sincerely, M.

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Online Abuses Survey (UK)

If you or anyone you know has been affected by Online Abuse, please complete this comprehensive survey to help with research for our report to Government on this issue. Each section takes approximately 3-5 minutes and has 10 quick questions. Not all surveys need to be completed. Please share!

Please access the survey here

 

 

 

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A double shock! When random contacts collide.

My website is a branch of hope for some people seeking help with trying to ascertain if the person they have been chatting to and most often have deep feeling for/fallen in love with,” is real or not.

My first contact is generally someone who has become wary of the person they are talking with and sometimes it’s a family member who can see that their relative is blinded by the story given by the ‘Catfish’ romance scammer.

Recently, I was contacted within the space of two weeks by two separate women from the USA.

Case Study 1

‘S’ emailed first. She told me the experience of her mother, who she knew had been defrauded. She had done so well to find out who the harvested photos belonged to through a reverse image search (and made contact with him to make him aware his pictures were being used for scams) and had also got the scammer himself to show his face on a video call. She had contacted me to ask if there was any way of tracking him further, to find out his real name for police and closure for her mother who had been communicating with this man for over two years. Money had exchanged hands but more so, the part of this that is so often ignored, she was devastated at the loss of the person she loved and the reality that he didn’t really exist.

Meyer William, the ‘middle aged white gentleman from London’, contacted S’s mother through Facebook Messenger. You can see more of his pictures here.

This man has had many of his pictures harvested to be used by scammers.

‘Meyer’ claimed to have moved to Malaysia for work with his son. What has become usual for me to hear, are the sob stories that were told to her mother, the emotional trick used to create empathy with the target to build trust, manipulate them, and finally as a tool to exploit them for money. The background behind the character always has a similar theme:

  • widowed parent/military
  • moved through employment for work to remote/foreign country/deployed abroad military
  • no internet/limited service in remote place/security lock down on internet usage
  • someone is ill/they are ill
  • issue with salary/bank/ID lost/cards lost
  • payments to friends/colleagues until problem sorted
  • need help to get back home 

These are obviously very emotive issues that will have a caring person feeling they need to help-especially after a connection has been made and trust in that person built over a period of time. 

‘S’ sent me the bank details her mother had been making payments to:

Bank: BBVA Compass 
City, state: Bishop, Texas  78343
Account : 6758******
Name: Phillips Acosta
Phone: 4322******
Code: CPASUS44 

Case Study 2

‘M’ emailed asking for help to find out if the man she had been speaking to, was who he said he was.

He had given his name as Antonio Michael Bello. Widowed with a daughter. He was claiming to be from Bristol in the UK with family in the USA. He is using a U.K. mobile number/Sim. Work had taken him to Asia. On attempting to return his bank card had been stolen/corrupt. Issues leaving. Fallen ill. Finally released from Asia then hospitalised on arrival back in the U.K (private bills). This scammer even had video footage of this guy to send. The story fits the similar pattern:

  • widowed parent/military
  • moved through employment for work to remote/foreign country/deployed abroad military
  • no internet/limited service in remote place/security lock down on internet usage
  • someone is ill/they are ill
  • issue with salary/bank/ID lost/cards lost
  • payments to friends/colleagues until problem sorted
  • need help to get back home 

Not coming from this country, unaware of other landscapes, style of houses, cars, details of how our medical system works etc… it can be easy to accept what these scammers are saying as true. However, there is nearly always a turning point when it starts to become clear that not all is as it seems.

This man may not be aware that his photos have been used to scam others. They do not show up on reverse image searches.

Scammers are constantly looking for new images to use as more people become aware of ‘reverse image searches’ and some dating websites have software to match images that have been used in scams previously.

Bank: BB&T BANK
Beneficiary Name: Philip Acosta Construction Company.
Beneficiary Address: 2979 County Road 14D Bishop, Texas 78343-5032
Acc#:1340*********
Routine : 053101121
Bank Address: 121 3rd St Ayden, Greenville/NC 28513-7252

You can imagine my surprise when I was logging this case information, to discover that both of these random women were being scammed  by the same gang. Both sets of bank details were to a beneficiary named Philip(s) Acosta and both were using banks in Bishop, Texas.

Once hooked by one of these scammers, they start the process of not only getting money from the target, but using other targets to make their money ‘lending’ seem real. 

‘M’ was asked to send money (via a secure postal source) to another female ‘V’ in America. She was told  ‘V’ would get the money into an account for transferring. He told her that he knew ‘V’ as he had worked in their family construction company for a while. ‘V’ was an older lady and checked out on Facebook by name and location details from the address given.

It’s most likely that ‘V’ was a victim too and ‘M’s’ money was part of the facade of him using money from a friend to ‘repay’ part of the money lent by ‘V’. Later she might be asked to ‘re-loan’ that money when another sob story is set. 

When they start to feel they are losing their grip on the victim, the scammers will get quite distant and nasty. They will  push buttons, make out it’s the victim fault that things don’t seem to be working out or even make a last push with faked documents such as these probate and wills to prove the ‘inheritence’ they are due. ‘M’ had already come to terms with the fact that Antonio wasn’t real at this point but was playing along:

One thing is certain. Both of these women were at vulnerable times in their lives. One widowed and one just getting a divorce. They were both easy targets for  professional scammers who have the ability to emotionally manipulate others, who have a kind and empathetic nature. You think it could never happen to you? Never be so certain. 

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Guest Blog: Romance Fraud and Bigamy

In our guest blog today, Kim Sow explains more about legalities and the ‘Justice’ system after discovering her husband was in fact already married. Kim now runs the ‘Immigration Marriage Fraud Consultancy’ to help others like herself.

One of the little talked about aspects of the dating scams is the rise in people being targeted for marriage to obtain immigration status in the UK.  As the immigration criteria tightens in other routes combined with the failure to remove illegal migrants, bogus students, failed asylum seekers etc they are turning to the spousal visa which is the weakest of all immigration systems as there are so few checks carried out. No marital checks, no affidavit of single person status, no declaration on the exclusivity of the relationship, no police certificate required and very few actual criminal checks are carried out. With an illegal migrant population in the UK estimated to be 1M this means that one in 65 people you meet is trying to secure their immigration status. Marriage is being used as an insurance policy against deportation.

To make matters worse the ‘Certificate of Approval’ system was removed. This was a process that meant that all foreign nationals had to be checked by the Home Office before they were allowed to marry in the UK. This removal led to a steep rise in Sham marriages and fraudulent marriages. In 2014 the EU named these ‘Marriages by Deception’ in other countries they are known as ‘Marriage Fraud’ or ‘Mariages Gris’. Bigamy and polygamy without consent has become a large feature in these frauds often combined with criminal pasts and fraudulent paperwork.

Online dating agencies and the religious matrimonial sites have become the ‘go to place’ to secure a marriage. Many victims naively believed that if somebody is in the UK that there must have been some checks carried out, they believe that when they go to the General Registry Office (which is part of the Home Office) for marriage that checks are carried out automatically when the reality is that only when the General Registry Office has suspicions can a Section 24 be issued and referral made to the Home Office. Again the spouse may believe that rigorous checks will be made when the spouse visa/family reunification process is started when this is not so and maybe even the dating sites themselves believe the propaganda of the ‘Hostile Environment’ not knowing the full extent of the issue that ‘ne’er do wells’ are entering the UK and marrying to secure their status.

Some examples:

A woman met a man on a dating site, they married and he obtained his spouse visa. It transpired he was on a criminal most wanted list in his own country and already married.

A man met a woman on a dating site who had several children, they married and she obtained a spouse visa. He believed he was step father to the children who he financially supported. It transpired that she was already married in a live relationship and that the children had a father who was very much in the picture and who inadvertently he was financially supporting.

A woman met a man on a dating site and it transpired that none of his details were correct and he had obtained numerous different official and unofficial identities. He had already been in prison for using fraudulent documentation in the UK. Transpired he was also married. Through marriage he obtained his immigration status.

A man met a woman on a dating site and they married. Transpired she had three husbands!

A woman met a man on a dating site. It transpired that he had been voluntarily deported for fraud but been given a letter from the Home Office stating that ‘should he apply on the basis of marriage he would not be refused’ so this is of course what he did and his wife had no knowledge of his criminal past.

Sadly, these cases are common. Unfortunately not all dating sites carry out checks and of course some of the sites are hosted abroad. Social media is also being used as a dating site e.g. a vulnerable woman was targeted by a foreign national, they married in the UK and it transpired that he was already married, not the age he purported to be nor of the profession he said. In fact not even his address was real that he had given in his home country. The disabled are particularly vulnerable to these frauds as there is a different immigration system for them and they do not have to prove an income of £18,600.

None of the above cases and the numerous similar are prosecuted. In 2014 the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration wrote his British Nationality Report. He could find no prosecutions other than for organised crime. The EU Commission recommended that all member states have a multi-agency forum including non statutory bodies to look at these ‘Marriages of Convenience’ unfortunately the UK did not implement. There are no cases of bigamy being prosecuted between a foreign national due to the out of date bigamy law. Issues such as jurisdiction, domicile and ‘subject of her majesty’ combined with CPS guidance making cases impossible to obtain an outcome. These cases could be prosecuted under the Fraud Act 2006 Section 2 or perhaps 4 but they are not. Furthermore these cases are a form of rape. Few victims would have consented to sex with their partners if they knew that they were already married and not the identity they purported to be! Whilst all forms of online dating scams are harmful imagine being bound to the fraudster in a contract of marriage that is extremely difficult to extract from without serious financial consequences unless there has been a prosecution.

Other countries have had great success in address when these frauds are used for immigration purposes. Here is the law of France as an example:

Article L623-1

The fact of contracting a marriage or recognising a child solely for the purpose of obtaining, or having obtained, a residence permit or the benefit of protection against expulsion, or for the sole purpose of acquiring, or acquire, the French nationality is punishable by five years of imprisonment and 15 000 Euros fine. These penalties are also incurred when the foreigner who has contracted marriage has concealed his intentions from his spouse.

The same penalties apply in case of organisation or attempt to organise a marriage or recognition of a child for the same purpose.

They are brought to ten years of imprisonment and to 750 000 Euros of fine when the infraction is committed in organised band

Great harm is being caused by these fraudsters and a prosecution strategy must be devised if we are to stop the growth and deter the fraudsters.

For more information see www.immigrationmarriagefraudconsultancy.com

You can read Kim’s own story here.

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Victim Abuse: The after effects of speaking out.

Your Story

Claire shares her story of adult grooming and abuse.

The Theatre of the Mind

I tried to download a dating app yesterday. It was on my phone for 30 seconds before I deleted it.

Lovebombed

Last Autumn, I met a man online who made me love him like no other. He was intellectual, academic, caring, funny, attentive and romantic. Our early conversations were so rapid fire that he was taking the words out of my mouth before they came out. We spoke for hours daily by phone.  It was breath taking. He took it slowly, gently, knew me better than I knew myself.  Now I know why. He’d researched.

Indeed, the ‘getting to know you’ period lasted so long that I eventually ‘friend zoned’ him.

That spurred him into action:  before I knew it I was meeting him at Platform 8, Waterloo Station. His face lit up when he saw me. This slightly cuddly, endearingly ordinary man captured my heart. I almost ‘loved’ him before I met him. He was my mirror, but the bit I liked, for the first time ever.

You hear about women who give everything up for someone they’ve never met. I’d never understood, regarding them as a bit silly, a bit needy. Yet here I was, one step short of it. Mr W, ex Royal Navy, academic, navigation expert, ex-pat living in Rotterdam, had turned me to jelly. We snogged goodbye like teenagers. He went off to a Naval ball at the Honourable Company of Master Mariners, and I headed home with a head full of him.

Our next date was due to be in Paris, but the weekend came and went – he had to work. He wanted to put me up in the New York Hotel in Rotterdam, close to where he lived so that we had an unpressured date. That too never materialised. To be honest, I’d assumed we’d do every other weekend there or here in the UK. It was a million miles from the practical, close-by relationship that I’d sought, but I talked myself into the benefits. For a while he was my closest friend.

He was hating his job. I was wanting him here. Our communication was so intense that I eventually told him to back off a little. He sounded hurt.

He became the centre of my life. I started leaving time free for him, just in case, taking his calls just before leaving for the gym and missing much needed classes.

Our next date was London. Unsure about taking our relationship up a gear, I booked an apartment rather than a hotel so that we had the option of separate beds. I knew I’d made a friend for life, but needn’t have worried. We laughed into bed and the world vanished. For a perfect couple of days we wrapped ourselves together, emotionally, mentally and physically engrossed in our escape from reality.

Coercion and Control

It was the first time I saw him lie, really coldly, convincingly, to his boss that he was getting a supervision for his PhD, when in fact he was tucked up with me and had given up his PhD. He won’t be the first person to bunk off work, but it struck me at the time how easily the lies tripped off his tongue.

Reality for us was harder outside the bunker. He hated his job in Rotterdam. He was getting less attentive, but that honeymoon period intensity couldn’t be expected to last. At least, that’s what I told myself as he apparently spent Christmas with his mother on a cruise in the Balkans, during which time he couldn’t be in touch. His relationship with his mother was, he claimed, complex. He was secretive about her. Apparently, a spurned ex had once turned up on her doorstep.

I gave up a business I’d been working on, a passion that had burned for years. I finally had the money to invest, but he persuaded me that it was too big a risk and we’d never get any time together.

In January, he bought me a flight to Rotterdam, and we were to have our first weekend date. All our other ‘trysts’ had been week days.  I was suspicious, about how he was making me feel, shabby, needy. I explained my feelings to him and he blamed my good friend for poisoning my mind.

Eventually he threw in the job. A leadership expert, he told me he thought the management at Simwave was shoddy. However, he was going for Chartered status at the Honourable Company of Master Mariners as a boost.

I was angrily told that I couldn’t go to the ceremony with him, that it was a silly little paper signing, and I was dispatched to Rotterdam to wait for him there. 

We’d both initially had tickets for later flights, but his job loss meant he brought them forward to give us more time together. I was now on the earlier flight, he was on a later one. I knew deep inside, despite having sent me a message from a gin bar the week before that he was warming up for my visit, that he wasn’t coming. But I had a ticket and accommodation at his expense. I’d never spent much time in Rotterdam, so went anyway. Sure enough, he didn’t turn up until the following morning. He’d “missed his flight” and apparently stayed in a very expensive hotel at the airport.

His communication started faltering. 

Eventually I called time, sure he was living with someone, especially as he had now moved back to the UK, jobless, but only ever managed passing meets. On Valentine’s Day, he came over from his mother’s in Essex with a bunch of garage flowers, but had to get to Portsmouth to catch a ship for ‘Navy Reserve’ duty that evening. The timings didn’t ring true.

Punishment

Eventually he talked me round.

It was easy. I’d been out with an ex in the gap, and it just wasn’t the same.

Mr W understood me. I accepted I was nasty and should have accepted that he had a thing about his mother. We had some bridges to build, and I was going to have to demure. Despite being unhappy at his mums, we couldn’t live together because he’d apparently married his second wife within six months. But, promisingly, he wanted me to hold off buying my little Spanish bolthole. He was going to buy it with me. We would have our little place away from the World.

Despite being conscious of some cruel things he did, I was feeling increasingly bad about myself, and spent days helping to research jobs for him, preparing presentations, to make amends.  Yet still deep inside feeling a niggle, I hired a private detective to find out what was really going on.

Eventually, two weeks of being ‘ghosted’ by him, worrying about the cancer he purported to being tested for, and having completely omitted to acknowledge my birthday despite having left it clear for a promised weekend in Paris, seven months of relationship ended with a little email about how difficult his life was and he had no more time for me. I replied that I was sorry, that whatever our relationship had diminished to, I was grateful for the good bits.

I was relieved.

The truth

It was too late to call off the investigators, they’d started work: he was living with a woman near Fareham, in a house he’d supposedly rented out. I sent him a choice text and moved on. To stop anyone else getting duped by him, I posted some of our pictures up on Facebook, a rare ‘public’ post, pointing out his marital situation and where he was living – not in the mess on a naval base or with mother.

The man had no more loved me than a politician kissing a baby. Awful truths started to crawl daily out of the woodwork. Alan Ayckbourn would be hard pushed to make up some of it, especially the Master Mariners event, where at least three women had wanted to attend. But the sadder stories were what he’d done to his family. I was just one in a string of women that he’d groomed into relationships.

I had consented to a physical relationship only after extracting an explicit promise of him being unmarried and not dating anyone else. That he had a clean bill of sexual health. He had lied to obtain that consent, was married, had multiple other partners simultaneously, and  had lied about his sexual status, putting me at risk.

My reward for loving Mr W was planned suicide (fortunately not acted on), a police harassment notice, and now a civil law suit because his wife claims to have suffered enough to need three months off work. He apparently bears no blame for this. It’s my fault for naming him.

I am no longer the person I was. He’s eaten at my self esteem. I doubt I’ll ever date again. How can I? The only person I’ve loved in over 30 years was never real, just a mind game.

Looking back through our conversations for the police and for my solicitors, he laced the clues,  lured me in to hurt me. He won the mind game.

Grooming is very different from an affair. Mr W only ever wanted me to break my own moral codes, to use his “theatre of the mind” to push my boundaries. I am shamed that he succeeded, in more ways than I’ll admit here.

But I’ll use that shame and disgust to make sure that people like him – men and women alike, are no longer allowed to hurt others legally. My explicit consent matters as much as money. More.

Too many victims end up further victimised when they speak out. He, meanwhile, and others like him, continue to re-offend with impunity.